[ANN] luabuild: Lua 5.3 support

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

Hi all,

luabuild is a mini source-based cross-platform distribution which is
intended to make it easier to make *standalone* executables.

 First, the flexible Lake-based build makes it easy to Lua executables
or shared libraries that may have built-in modules (e.g. debug)
removed and external modules statically linked in (e.g.
luafilesystem).  These executables live in their own sandbox even on
Unix - they do not reference the system-wide module paths.

Second, comes with Jay Carlson's soar which analyzes a Lua program and
gives two outputs: a single-file Lua script from the source files (and
any pure Lua modules used) and a file giving any binary extensions
found.  This version of soar can now statically analyze Lua 5.2 (and
up).

Third, lhf's srlua is then used to glue this single-file script (or
archive) to a suitable custom Lua executable.

luabuild includes latest Lua 5.3.0 rc2 source; if you want to build
Lua 5.3 plus a set of useful extensions (lfs, socket, luaposix/winapi,
...)  then first set the environment variable LUA53 to something, and
then 'build' or './build' will do the job.  If on Windows, then
running 'build' in a MSVC prompt will use the MS compiler, otherwise
defaults to gcc.  On the other side, if you don't want or have gcc,
then './build CC=clang' will have the desired effect.

You can then say 'tests' or './tests' to test the built modules.

This is very much a preliminary release which I wanted to knock out
with the new release candidate, more tire-kicking and better
documentation must wait for the New Year.  I've tested with Windows 7
64-bit (MSVC 2010, TDM gcc 4.5.1) and Linux (32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 gcc
4.8.2, clang 3.5  and 64-bit Debian with gcc 4.4).

If nothing else, it should give you a Lua 5.3 with some batteries installed ;)

steve d.