I Can't Get Lua 5.1 and IUP 3.30 to Work With VSCode and GCC on Windows 10 x64

Hello,

I’ve been stuck on this problem for weeks despite researching forums, tutorials, and Lua/IUP documentation. I’ve been working on updating an abandoned app that uses mostly Lua scripts and one C script that calls the header files. I was content to change the Lua files then run the app’s .exe file to check the results, which worked very well, but now I want to update IUP in order to use some new features as well as be able to compile and debug the code in VSCode (it’d be nice if I could turn the app’s source files into an .exe for other users) but I’m not experienced in technical stuff like that. I just want to get everything working so I can get back to the Lua scripts.

I tried installing iup-3.30-Lua51_Win64_bin.zip but couldn’t get that to work (how can the compiler find the headers without .h files?) and I also tried downloading Lua, IUP, CD, and IM (the versions with .h files) separately and putting them in their own folders as shown on the IUP site. I had some luck with getting a simple C file that “include”s Lua to compile and run (it prints text from a Lua file), but couldn’t get IUP to work. VSCode just couldn’t find it. I tried setting up environment variables like page 6 in this PDF guide (https://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/71/04700691/0470069171.pdf) but it didn’t work and by page 20, I was confused because the file structure and contents of the lua-5.1.5_Win64_bin.zip file I’d downloaded was different than what the PDF said to expect and I didn’t know what to do about it.

The app’s source file folder contained iuplua51.exe. The C file starts with the note “Creates a Lua executable linked to all standard IUP libraries * Based on the Lua stand-alone interpreter for Lua 5.1”. If I opened that and executed the main Lua file, I could launch the app, but then I’d get errors because it couldn’t find global variables defined in the C file.

The folder also contained a .loh file (not sure what that is), and a Makefile that had important-looking instructions such as:

### Targets library directories

gcc_LIBDIRS= -L./lua-5.1/lib -L../iup/lib/mingw3 -L../cd/lib/mingw3 -L../im/lib/mingw3

I tried using “-I”, “-L”, and “-l” in my c_cpp_properties.json and tasks.json files, but only had success with the individually installed Lua, not IUP. The Makefile mentions the variable “gcc_CC=mingw32-gcc.exe” so I went looking for that compiler, but I have x64, so I downloaded that version instead and got it working with VSCode. I have a VSC extension to run Makefiles, but I don’t know much about it or whether running this Makefile could solve my problem somehow and make VSCode/GCC see the dependencies.

Does anyone know how I can get all this stuff working together?

Thank you for your time,

Kaz