Re: Android support

[Marc Balmer <marc@...>]

Am 25.12.16 um 20:02 schrieb Thomas Fletcher:

> On Dec 25, 2016 7:02 AM, "Marc Balmer" <marc@msys.ch
> <mailto:marc@msys.ch>> wrote:
>>
>> I am late to the game, but I recently started working on an Android app
>> that includes Lua.  Fortunately I have quite a bit of experience with
>> the JNI and several (non Android) projects where Lua is called from
> Java...
>>
>> Now I wonder how other Android/Lua hackers handle 'require' for modules
>> written in C/C++.  Do you link your modules with Lua into a single
>> library or do you create several .so files?  If the latter, how do you
>> trick Lua into loading the right shared object?
> 
> With Storyboard we give the user the ability to list their binary
> modules and then preload them in the main android application by
> dlopening the files so that later when we retry within a secondary or
> tertiary module it succeeds.

Thanks so far.  So I am now able to detect the CPU architecture and ABI
using C preprocessor defines and in theory I can now adjust the
LUA_CPATH_DEFAULT definition in luaconf.h.  But is the APK file actually
unpacked on the Android device's file system?  I.e. can I just adjust
the CPATH and then use dlopen() to load the module?  Or do I have unzip
the APK first?

I was also considering writing a separate loader that calls
System.loadLibrary() via the JNI, but then that assumes as "lib" prefix
on the shared library, which we omit for Lua modules (we often have a C
library called e.g. libfoobar.so _and_ a Lua binding to it called
foobar.so).