How to make a static Lua?

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

Hi all,

After introduction of the systemd init system, a lot of people are
creating their own init systems. One guy did it in Ruby.

I'm thinking that Lua is much smaller than Ruby, and in my opinion it's
more understandable, and from what I read, it's faster. The reason it
would be good to be static is so that an initramfs wouldn't be
necessary (though it usually is for other reasons). But static
compilation isn't absolutely necessary: all the libraries could go in
an initramfs.

The version of Lua for this thing would need to have signal handling,
forking, and exec'ing. Are those features in place with standard Lua?

Is 5.3 available pretty much everywhere these days? If not, which Lua
is the most widely available?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
April 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21