Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

140 :: Compilation with built-in Lua (not just bound)

• cathalgarvey (orginal) [2013-03-24T18:20:02+01:00] view original

  Hi all, Forgive me if this is a dumb question. I come from Python land, and I want to complement my scripted-programming skills with a good compiled language. Nimrod looks awesome because it compiles to a standard, cross-platform intermediate (C), and because it's got a nice, flexible syntax, and because it seems to play nicely with scripted languages, although that aspect seems poorly documented as yet.

  Lua in particular seems interesting to me because in theory the Lua compiler could be compiled into the final binary, giving a nice marriage of high-level scripting and cross-platform compiled.

  The documentation and "blurb" discusses "bindings" for Lua, but that implies Lua has to be separately installed. The point of Lua is to embed it in binary distributions, so how would I do this in Nimrod, and how would I use/call the embedded interpreter to interact with native Nimrod code in the rest of the code?

---

• Araq (orginal) [2013-03-25T02:17:15+01:00] view original

  The distribution contains examples/luaex.nim to for a tiny example of how to interface with Lua. Fwiw it runs on my Linux out of the box; many Linux distributions now include some version of Lua per default.

  Indeed almost all the wrappers use dynamic linking via dlsym (or the OS's equivalent); it's possible to change that and since it's been requested frequently, it now made it on my todo list. :-) If you don't like to wait until that's been implemented you can of course also copy&modify the existing wrapper to use static linking.

  Nimrod's macros can automate all the tedious marshalling/unmarshalling that has to occur at the scripting/Nimrod boundaries. However, afaik these macros have yet to be written. ;-)

---

• Araq (orginal) [2013-04-08T16:41:47+02:00] view original

  Overriding the 'dynlib' pragma has been implemented. nimrod c --dynlibOverride:lua --passL:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.1.a --passL:-lm examples/luaex produces an executable that links statically against Lua on my machine.

---