Lua with CMake Support

Unaltered Lua source code and documentation with CMake build infrastructure. This repository contains Lua Version 5.4.7 sources extracted from https://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.7.tar.gz. Tested generators and architectures are:

• Visual Studio 17 2022, Win32
• Visual Studio 17 2022, x64

Notice: Present Makefiles originate from Lua source code archive and are not used within the context of CMake-based build.

Windows Tool Chain Preparation

A complete Microsoft Visual Studio Installation is optional but not strictly necessary. Simply install Buildtools for Visual Studio 2022 from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/de/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022 and select the following minimum components for download and installation:

• MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++-x64/x86-Buildtools
• C++-CMake-Tools for Windows
• Windows 11-SDK (10.0.22621.0)

Building and Installing Lua

Open Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022 and change drive and directory. Download and unpack sources or simply clone this repository:

c:
cd c:\Temp
git clone git@github.com:KritzelKratzel/lua.git
cd lua

CMake strongly encourages out-of-source builds.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A <arch>
cmake --build . --config Release
cmake --install . --config Release

Replace <arch> with your desired architecture. Available architectures with selected Visual Studio 17 2022 generator are Win32, x64, ARM and ARM64. Default installation directory is C:/Apps/lua-5.4.7 where a directory structure according to GNU Coding Standards is created:

• bin: Lua binaries lua.exe and luac.exe, both statically linked, no DLL dependency,
• include: Public header files,
• lib: Lua static library liblua.lib,
• share: documentation, man-pages, CMake configuration.

The default installation path can be overwritten by using CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX at the command line during CMake configuration. Example:

cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="C:\Foo\Bar"

Finally add the path to Lua to Windows search path for executables.

setx PATH "%PATH%;C:\Apps\lua-5.4.7\bin"

Open an new command window and test lua. Use CTRL-C to leave Lua in interactive mode.

C:\Users\John Doe>lua
Lua 5.4.7  Copyright (C) 1994-2024 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> print(_VERSION)
Lua 5.4
>
C:\Users\John Doe>