Re: Four paradigms for programming Lua apllications

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2. A precompiled standalone.

Can now pretty much automatically go from (1) to (2).  This is
particularly attractive if writing applications for a consumer OS that
doesn't have a package manager.[1]

Two stages (a) amalgamate all Lua source into a single archive
(Squish, soar, and so forth) and (b) glue that archive to a Lua stub
executable (srlua)

The rationale behind luabuild was to automate this as much as possible:
 - customizable 5.2 build for the stub - leave out builtin modules,
add in external modules
 - Jay's soar to construct the archive
 - lhf's srlua to glue the archive to the stub

Jay wrote soar because he found Squish too complex[2] and it's
strength is that it provides both static and dynamic ways to find the
dependencies, particularly the external ones.

Not 100%, because luabuild only integrates the core external modules,
but getting there (if there's any interest in building custom shared
libraries then I'll pursue that avenue)

[1] not just the obvious one ;)
[2] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2012-02/msg00609.html