Re: [ANN] Windows MSI Installer for PUC-Lua - Proof Of Concept

The Lua source distribution builds and runs just fine on Visual Studio (Community - free - Edition) on Windows 10. At least VS 2015 and 32-bit, I've not got around to rebuilding any of my projects with VS 2017 yet and do not really see the point of a 64-bit binary (32-bit runs fine on 64-bit Windows). Just dump the source files into an empty Win32 C++ Console project (File|New|Project|Other Languages|Win32|Win32 Console Application) and you are good to go. You may need some linker settings to make it truly stand alone as it will probably depend on "Visual Studio Redistributables" by default, although if you let VS make the installer package it will install those too if necessary.

Microsoft are hopeless at adopting their own snake-oil and despite promoting C# and the CLR for years now most of their own code base is still C++ so that still gets first-class tooling in VS.

The problems using Lua on Windows start with third-party libraries and the Linux-inspired distribution formats. Unlike most library developers, Roberto's team have done an excellent job making Lua sources compile without change just about anywhere C is spoken.

Date: 2017年5月17日 00:12:10 -0700

From: Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [ANN] Windows MSI Installer for PUC-Lua - Proof Of

 Concept

 

So I'm starting to see the complications now. The 64 bit binary "just

works" on Window 10, but the 32 bit seems to still require mingw

(Error message "The program can't start because libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is

missing from your computer"). Using various VCRedist packages

(2008,2010,2017) against joefds' binaries wasn't effective (had to

try). I could look at linking the mingw installer into my PUC-Lua

installer or ...

 

The other possibility is to try Visual Studio 2017. From what I can

tell the VS 2015 and 2017 release includes the C library support that

made mingw a requirement (if you trust a C# developers understanding

of C libraries!). That means I could set up a VC++ project to compile

Lua and link in the installer and add the merge module to create a

single MSI tool (I think). WIX is designed to integrate with Visual

Studio (2015 release at least) so potentially a single Solution file

could be created (and shared). If you wanted to open up Lua to Windows

developers, I think this may be an optimal route.

 

Well, VS Community Edition is a "free" version of a paid for product

but I think this is moving into "paid-for" land. I'll still try not to

hurt any small animals while compiling, though. If anyone has already

been down this path, I'd love to here from you.

 

Okay, take two...

 

Russ