Newbie question about porting

["Frederic Rudman" <frudman@...>]

Hello All, sorry for the posting. I'm not sure yet what the protocol is for
this mailing list/newsgroup so I posted it to all. Let me know if that's
wrong.

I've just found out about Lua and it may be the answer to multiple problems
we've been having. In particular, I need to port a reasonably strong/high
level interpreted language to a very small footprint device. Lua certainly
fits that.

My first question is: how native-stack hungry is the interpreter/vm (we'll
only use the interpreter in the device: all compilation/parsing will be done
"offline" on a regular workstation). Specifically, we have less than 300
words of stack available in the machine for everything. Is that OK for the
Lua VM? Will it be close? Is the stack used dependant on the Lua program
being run or can it be computed to a fixed amount? Or is it a "Stack is way
too small. No way Lua VM will ever run on that device"?

Question 2: the cpu for this device is an old TMS320 from TI with 16-bit
bytes! How much tinkering will I need in order to port the Lua VM? A lot? A
little? I know there'll be at least a little because at first glance I've
noticed that the generated code (from luac) seems to be 8-bit-byte oriented
(right?).

Question 3: This device does not have the regular ANSI-C library of modules
but we did implement some of the basics (malloc, strcmp, ...) but only a few
of these. Does anyone know which modules I'll need to implement to compile
and run the vm on this new environment (or where to go to find out about
these modules).

Question 4: Has anyone in this newsgroup ported the Lua VM to 16-bit byte
machines? What's your general conclusion about that?

I know that's a lot of questions, and I apologize for that. I'm new to this
but I promise I'll learn fast!

Sincerely,
Frederic Rudman