Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua is free software.
For complete information, visit Lua's web site at http://www.lua.org/ . For an executive summary, see http://www.lua.org/about.html .
This is Lua 5.4.7, released on 2024-06-25.
The build process supports only command line tools.
Lua release comes with the lua.exe luac.exe and liblua54.dll binaries, libraries and header files. In case you wish to create your own binary build, download or clone Lua sources and follow a few standard rules.
To compile Lua from source code you will need either Microsoft C/C++ Compiler from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or any later version.
The official distributions are build using Custom Microsoft Compiler Toolkit compiler bundle.
Presuming that you have downloaded and unzipped CMSC release in the root of C drive.
Open command prompt in the directory where you have downloaded or cloned Lua and do the following
> C:\cmsc-15.0_39\setenv.bat
Using default architecture: x64
Setting build environment for win-x64/0x0601
> nmake
Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 9.00.30729.207
...In case there are no compile errors, binaries are located inside x64-rel-dll subdirectory.
To build the Lua using an already installed Visual Studio, you will need to open the Visual Studio native x64 command line tool. The rest is almost the same as with CMSC toolkit.
Here is the example for Visual Studio 2012
Inside the Start menu select Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 then
click on Visual Studio Tools and click on
Open VC2012 x64 Native Tools Command Prompt.
If using Visual Studio 2017 or later, open command prompt
and call vcvars64.bat from Visual Studio install location
eg, C:\Program Files\Visual Studio 2017\VC\Auxiliary\Build
After setting the compiler, use the following
> cd C:\Some\Location\lua
> nmake
The binary should be inside x64-rel-dll subdirectory.
Using Visual Studio, Lua can be built as statically linked to the MSVCRT library.
Add _STATIC_MSVCRT=1 as nmake parameter:
> nmake _STATIC_MSVCRT=1
By default Makefile builds Lua Library as dll. To build
static version of the library add _STATIC=1 as nmake parameter
> nmake _STATIC=1
This will build lua54.lib, lua.exe and luac.exe. The binary should be inside x64-rel-lib subdirectory.
Makefile has two additional targets which can be useful for Lua development and maintenance
> nmake cleanThis will remove all produced binaries and object files by deleting x64 subdirectory.
> nmake PREFIX=C:\some\directory installStandard makefile install target that will copy the executables, libraries and include files to the PREFIX location.
This can be useful if you are building Lua with some Continuous build application that needs produced binaries at a specific location for later use.
To create a release use the provided mkrelease.bat script
> mkrelease.bat 5.4.7_1 x64 "_VENDOR_SFX=_1"Inside dist directory you can find .zip and .txt files containing build artifacts and release metadata
The code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License according to the upstream project.