Compiling bitlib on Mac OS X

[James Edward Gray II <james@...>]

Hello all.  I'm brand new to Lua.  I read the (first edition)  
Programming in Lua a while back, but hadn't found the time to play  
with the language much.  This weekend though, I ran into a problem my  
good friend Ruby just wasn't fast enough to effectively solve.  That  
got me to give Lua a go.

I have a working solution now, but it's still a little slow.  I'm  
pretty sure the reason is that I needed bit operations and I just  
used LuaBit because it was easy to get working.  I've found the  
bitlib though and would like to try it.

I tried to figure it out, but I'm just no good at this kind of  
thing.  I couldn't figure out how to add a compiled bitlib to my Lua  
build.  Could someone give me some hints?

I'm on Mac OS X and have compiled Lua 5.1.  I need to know:

1.  How do I compile bitlib so Lua will be able to load it?
2.  How to load that library once I have made it that far?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

James Edward Gray II