Larch

Larch is a Lua ARCHive generator.

Trivially, when given a list of Lua source files, Larch wraps them up as a script that preloads those sources, somewhat akin to shar.

Less trivially, it adds a shell script preamble that will look for a suitable Lua interpreter and re-execute the archive using that.

Most interesting of all, it provides the infrastructure for incorporating LuaMacro lexical macros into the listed sources, and expanding those into valid Lua code in the generated script archive.

This release provides only the from macro, which provides a compact syntax for copying table keys, which is useful for importing module symbols:

from "specl.std" import Object, string.escape_pattern

is equivalent to:

local std = require "specl.std"
local Object, escape_pattern = std.Object, std.string.escape_pattern

Also, with a table instead of a string as the first argument:

from state import expectations, ispending, stats

is equivalent to:

local expectations, ispending, stats =
      state.expectations, state.ispending, state.stats

There are also custom loaders so that source files using from (or other macros) can be required directly, expanding the macros on the fly. This is, of course, much slower than using larch to pre-expand the macros and make a script that preloads the results.

Installation

There's no need to download a Larch release, or clone the git repo, unless you want to modify the code. If you use LuaRocks, you can use it to install the latest release from it's repository:

luarocks install larch

Or from the rockspec in a release tarball:

luarocks make larch-?-1.rockspec

To install current git master from GitHub (for testing):

luarocks install http://raw.github.com/gvvaughan/larch/release/larch-git-1.rockspec

To install without LuaRocks, clone the sources from the repository, and then run the following commands:

cd larch
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=INSTALLATION-ROOT-DIRECTORY
make all check install

The dependencies are listed in the dependencies entry of the file rockspec.conf. You will also need Autoconf and Automake.

See INSTALL for instructions for configure.

Documentation

Larch includes Markdown formatted documentation.