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Show HN: Luastatic – Build an executable from a Lua program

by ers35 on 10/26/15, 2:50 AM with 13 comments

• by camperman on 10/26/15, 2:23 PM

  You can do this in Luajit with the following trick:

      for f in *.lua; do
          luajit -b $f `basename $f .lua`.o
      done
      
      ar rcus libmylib.a *.o
      gcc -o myexe main-stub.c -I/usr/local/include/luajit-2.0 -L/usr/local/lib -lluajit-5.1 -Wl,--whole-archive libmylib.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive -Wl,-E
  

  Where main-stub.c looks like this:

      #include <lua.h>
      #include <lauxlib.h>
      #include <stdlib.h>
      #include <stdio.h>
  
  
      int
      main(void)
      {
          int status, result, i;
          lua_State *L;
  
          L = luaL_newstate();
  
          luaL_openlibs(L);
  
          /* load your lua entry point here */
          status = luaL_loadfile(L, "mainluafile.lua");
          if (status) {
              fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't load file: %s\n", lua_tostring(L, -1));
              exit(1);
          }
  
  
          result = lua_pcall(L, 0, LUA_MULTRET, 0);
          if (result) {
              fprintf(stderr, "Failed to run script: %s\n", lua_tostring(L, -1));
              exit(1);
          }
  
          lua_close(L);
  
          return 0;
      }
  

  The executables produced are very small because you dynamically link to Luajit and statically link to your own Lua code. I have a full media scheduler running at 100 sites which is only 40k. And it runs like a demon on ARM too.

• by larme on 10/26/15, 11:45 AM

  For multiple lua files, you can first bundle them into a single lua file using squish.[0]

  [0]: https://github.com/LuaDist/squish

• by fasteo on 10/26/15, 10:22 AM

  Also check:

  Bundle [1], using LuaJIT

  Luvi [2], which is also able to generate a single file executable and you can include static resources.

  [1] https://luapower.com/bundle

  [2] https://github.com/luvit/luvi

• by unmole on 10/26/15, 10:20 AM

  Similar project for Python: http://www.pyinstaller.org/ Works with multiple source files and supports widely used Python modules out of the box.

• by motiejus on 10/26/15, 9:52 AM

  Pretty good size: 214K (on amd64 Linux):

    $ ls -lhd hello
          -rwxr-xr-x 1 admin admin 214K Oct 26 09:53 hello
    $ ldd hello
  	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fff5f5ff000)
  	libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f10611e7000)
  	libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f1060fe3000)
  	libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f1060c39000)
  	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f10614f6000)
  

  (edit: formatting)

• by hbbio on 10/26/15, 9:32 AM

  This is an interesting project, thanks for sharing.

  Did you explore the possibility to use LuaJIT instead? The ability to do this and also integrate with Terra http://terralang.org/ would create a great project!

• by ifoundthetao on 10/26/15, 2:25 PM

  Ha! I remember you from the G-Wan forum days (:

  I'm so excited to see you're still active!