LuaX usage survey

[CDSoft]

Hi,

Here is just a quick survey about LuaX usage.
I'm interested in knowing on which platforms LuaX is actually used:

• Linux / x86_64 / libc
• Linux / x86_64 / musl
• Linux / aarch64 / libc
• Linux / aarch64 / musl
• MacOS / x86_64
• MacOS / aarch64
• Windows / x86_64

and if some other platforms (supported by Zig) would be of interest.

Bonus question for Windows users : is Windows support really needed? if yes, could WSL be a viable alternative?

Thanks for your interest.

[KernelKinetic]

I like the portability of LuaX in contrast to pure Lua. E. g. it's not possible to use openssl on Windows without LuaRocks and even with it it's a pain. LuaX works out of the box, the same code on every platform. WSL isn't an apropriate solution since it's not integrated very well. I'm using LuaX mostly on Windows and MacOS aarch64, rarely on Linux. But I'm just one of many users. if I'm the only one it's not a problem if you decide to move to WSL only, for example. Thanks for the lovely and fast implementation and the good documentation for an one-developer project. Many larger projects could take this as an example.

[AmerM137]

I am mainly a Windows user, and I like LuaX because the REPL and included libraries are so much richer than the default Lua repl. I come from a Python/IPython background so having a REPL open all the time for quick testing is the norm for me.

I don't really use WSL unless I am testing something that will need to be run on Linux eventually for work purposes, or I am about to put a python project in production to run on a server.

It would be great to have some way to build this on Window with MinGW tools, in case you decide to drop the release binaries. I've had good results building most of my CLI tools as well as my main text editor (Lite-XL) with the MinGW collection from here https://github.com/brechtsanders/winlibs_mingw using PowerShell Core.

Thank you for putting all of this together and sharing it!

[CDSoft]

Thanks for your feedback. I understand that Windows is used and WSL is not an alternative in some cases. I can continue maintaining the windows target (keep in mind that some OS or filesystem specific function may have different behaviours).

Building on Windows is a bit trickier. I could add a bootstrap.bat script but the compilation of OpenSSL is not so easy, it requires perl. I made some quick tests with msys but msys is an hybrid environment mixing some linux and windows features. It is also not supported by zig and would require more work. In this case it should still be possible to cross-compile luax with WSL and run it on windows.

$ git clone https://github.com/CDSoft/luax
$ cd luax
$ ./bootstrap.sh release ssl

The Windows LuaX distribution should be in .build/dist/luax-XXX-windows-x86_64 and archived in .build/release/XXX/luax-XXX-windows-x86_64.tar.gz

[KernelKinetic]

I'm using LuaX just for fun for some small hobby projects. So for me it's absolutely fine to build it on a virtual machine instead of expecting native Windows build support. Being a professional developer some years ago, so I know how hard it is to provide cross platform build scripts, even if you use tools like CMake for example. So thanks again for the good work - is there a way for a one-time support that is kept private (Liberapay states to publish payments)?

By the way, I didn't know about the 'release' option of bootstrap.sh since I didn't found it in its help message. Using this option on macOS shows the following error:
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
Building without 'release' seems to work fine and creates the corresponding subfolders and files in .build/release/, but it doesn't creates the gzip archives, obviously. Not a big problem for me, just saying.

Edit: I've just seen that building works fine even with creating the archives if there are previous bootstrap settings. Bootstrapping seems to fail for a fresh checkout.

[CDSoft]

I've no idea on how to do private payments. It this that github adds mentions on sponsors' profiles. On Liberapay, donators are listed in a private list. I guess only I have access to this list. I see in my profile that I need a stripe account to accept secret payments, I'll have a look.

Cross compilation is in fact very easy with zig.

I'll keep the --sort option on Linux only, thanks for the report.

Which error messages do you get when bootstrapping a fresh checkout ?

[KernelKinetic]

Thanks for having a look 🙂

I did a git clone https://github.com/cdsoft/luax some minutes ago on macOS aarch64, ran ./bootstrap.sh cross ssl release and got the output below (submodule checkout and build output excluded). Nevertheless ninja install seems to work as expected and the release files are built. Just the gzipped packages are missing. It seems that tar doesn't have a sort option on macOS.

Compile .build/bin/lua
ld: warning: -s is obsolete
sh: pandoc: command not found
[0/779] install zig 0.13.0
[30/779] download OpenSSL
Submodule 'ext/opt/openssl' (https://github.com/openssl/openssl) registered for path 'ext/opt/openssl'

...

/Users/<username>/.local/opt/zig/0.13.0/zig ranlib libcrypto.a || echo Never mind.
[772/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-lua.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-lua.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-lua.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-lua  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[773/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64-musl.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64-musl.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64-musl.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-linux-aarch64-musl  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[774/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64-musl.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64-musl.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64-musl.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-linux-x86_64-musl  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[775/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-windows-x86_64.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-windows-x86_64.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-windows-x86_64.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-windows-x86_64  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[776/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-x86_64.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-x86_64.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-x86_64.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-macos-x86_64  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[777/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-aarch64.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-linux-aarch64  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[778/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-aarch64.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-aarch64.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-macos-aarch64.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-macos-aarch64  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
[779/779] tar .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
FAILED: .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz 
tar -caf .build/release/8.4/luax-8.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C .build/dist luax-8.4-linux-x86_64  --sort=name
tar: --sort=name: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.

[CDSoft]

ok, the next version should work better.

ld: warning: -s is obsolete

==> I think -s is not used by ld on macos (just a warning, all executable are then built)

sh: pandoc: command not found

==> bang searches for pandoc to build the documentation. If pandoc is not installed, the documentation won't be updated, which is useless if you just want to compile and install luax.

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

==> will be fixed in 8.5 (this evening 🤞 ). If 8.5 won't work, we'll open a separate issue.

[KernelKinetic]

Sorry for capturing your survey issue :D Current version builds also the gzipped packages as expected. I like the Release Notes very very much!

[CDSoft]

New new requests must be send to codeberg.org/cdsoft/luax.