Re: Storing Lua code in a C library

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 4:17 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:33 AM, steve donovan
> <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And that's to embed the source directly in a C file, as a properly
>> escaped multiline C string, which is then loaded.
>
> And, due to popular demand, a simple script for converting a Lua
> module into a loadable C module.
>
> https://gist.github.com/2787105
>
> foo.c is the result of 'lua2c foo', with foo.lua looking like this:
>
> module 'foo'
>
> function answer()
>        return 42
> end
>
> However, there is a problem when the module starts 'module(...)' since
> luaL_loadstring does not compile the chunk correctly for this case.
>
> I tested this on ml.lua, which is about 782 lines; lua2c strips
> comments and leading space, so the final output is about 500 lines.
> The compiled C extension is a bit smaller than the original Lua file;
> another comparison is that it's a 18K dll versus 23K .luac file.
>
> To test packages, I put ml.lua in a directory libs, and then said
> 'lua2c libs.ml', which resulted in libs_ml.c in the current directory,
> and libs/ml.dll.
>
> This should work fine for Lua 5.2 as well
>
> And there's always yet another method; use squsih/soar to get all your
> Lua files into one archive, and glue that to a Lua executable with
> srlua.  (that's basically the rationale behind LuaBuild)
>
> steve d.
>

Thanks for all the input. I decided that if anyone is going to go to
the effort of ripping out the compiler, they're probably not going to
use my libraries anyway (at least not without modification), and
changed the build process to just embed the text source instead. I
might still hack up a simple compression scheme, though I don't want
to add another dependency... the code is probably too small to bother
anyway.

-- 
Sent from my Game Boy.