RE: Lua libraries

[Nick Trout <Nick.Trout@...>]

> you could call from Tcl to access his dbms.  I started thinking about 
> all of the libraries that are available for Tcl and how easy it is to 
> use them (just type "load mylib.dll").  I wish Lua had this.

I think there are 2 ways of doing this, either runtime to preprocess.
Runtime, you could interrogate the DLL and find out what is available,
publish it and provide a mechanism to call it. eg.

*nix FFI: http://luagnome.free.fr/luaffi.php3
Perhaps this could be extended X-platform? A mechanism for doing this on
win32 was described a while back.

Or you could interogate the DLL and create a binding to Lua which again
could be a DLL. eg. to do type checking etc. This might be more appropriate
since you can add custom code for a particular module.

http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~rborges/loadlib/

 
> I was thinkg along the same lines as Ignacio (but less technically, 
> because I don't understand exactly how it all works).  I know loadlib 
> lets you call dlls.  So if someone could maintain a compiled 
> binary of 
> "base" lua + loadlib, and then all of the extension authors could 
> provide their library in the form of a dll that could be accessed 
> through loadlib, this would give the lua community the same "ease of 
> use" and functionality that Tcl now enjoys.

Apparently LuaYada contains loadlib: http://angg.twu.net/index.html#lua

Regards,
Nick