Re[2]: [ANN] Windows MSI Installer for PUC-Lua - Proof Of Concept

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

This may give some pointers:

https://github.com/JohnHind/Winsh.lua

It is probably a lot more bloated than your aim but maybe less bloated 
than alternatives (a self-contained EXE comes in at around 1MB). I did 
not manage to generate much interest in this at the time, but have 
continued to develop it and use it personally. If there was any interest 
I would update the GitHub.

Certainly it would not be difficult to make an installer for basic 
(command-line) Lua using VS Community Edition. If you want even a very 
simple GUI you need some kind of library/framework (I used WTL which is 
very light-weight, but somewhat outdated today).

------ Original Message ------
From: "Russell Haley" <russ.haley@gmail.com>
To: "John Hind" <john.hind@zen.co.uk>; "Lua mailing list" 
<lua-l@lists.lua.org>
Sent: 17/05/2017 17:19:55
Subject: Re: [ANN] Windows MSI Installer for PUC-Lua - Proof Of Concept

> On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:11 AM, John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk> 
> wrote:
> >  The Lua source distribution builds and runs just fine on Visual 
> > Studio
> >  (Community - free - Edition) on Windows 10. At least VS 2015 and 
> > 32-bit,
> >  I've not got around to rebuilding any of my projects with VS 2017 yet 
> > and do
> >  not really see the point of a 64-bit binary (32-bit runs fine on 
> > 64-bit
> >  Windows). Just dump the source files into an empty Win32 C++ Console 
> > project
> >  (File|New|Project|Other Languages|Win32|Win32 Console Application) 
> > and you
> >  are good to go. You may need some linker settings to make it truly 
> > stand
> >  alone as it will probably depend on "Visual Studio Redistributables" 
> > by
> >  default, although if you let VS make the installer package it will 
> > install
> >  those too if necessary.
> >
> >  Microsoft are hopeless at adopting their own snake-oil and despite 
> > promoting
> >  C# and the CLR for years now most of their own code base is still C++ 
> > so
> >  that still gets first-class tooling in VS.
> >
> >  The problems using Lua on Windows start with third-party libraries 
> > and the
> >  Linux-inspired distribution formats. Unlike most library developers,
> >  Roberto's team have done an excellent job making Lua sources compile 
> > without
> >  change just about anywhere C is spoken.
>
> Thanks for the input!
>
> I am now seeing the complications of including LuaRocks and other
> applications and libraries. I understand why the other distributions
> for windows have become bloated because there is so much dependency on
> linked libraries and external dependencies. I think my focus is
> changing. I want to provide a dead simple installer for installing the
> latest PUC Lua on any Windows machine. I'll look at other optional
> items like LuaRocks (i.e. chaining lr4win) if I get the basics done
> first.
>
> I have to say for a beginner, ZeroBrane is an excellent option as it
> simply downloads and works. It also has lots of tutorials and examples
> that run right through the UI. Nice job Paul! I wonder out loud if
> there is a way to run Lua outside the IDE or deploy solutions.
>
> Russ