Static linking to vendored Lua

[atweiden]

This module doesn’t build without Lua development libraries installed on the build host. This is a shortcoming compared to the situation in mlua, where users needn’t have Lua pre-installed for static linking to mlua’s vendored copy of Lua to work.

Does Go support this type of build? Would it take a custom Makefile or similar? I’ve forked golua to ~ioiojo/golua to experiment, but I don’t see how to link my vendored copy of Lua. As an example, see the lua-c-api/zig subdirectory of ~ioiojo/export-anytype: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/export-anytype/tree/master/item/lua-c-api/zig/internal/luautils/luautils.go

[aarzilli]

I've never looked into lua's build system. It might be that you can just throw all of the source files into a directory and just let cgo do its thing. If it's anything more complicated you can't do it because cmd/go doesn't let you run arbitrary code at install time.

[atweiden]

One can vendor Lua in their golua-using module, compile Lua with a Makefile or similar, and then link to the vendored Lua library using CGO_CFLAGS + CGO_LDFLAGS.

Enabling this would seem to require patching golua’s lua/lua.go to include a declaration for lua_gc_compat in the Cgo special comments section, e.g.

/*
...
LUA_API int (lua_gc_compat) (lua_State *L, int what, int data);
...
*/
import "C"

... rather than patching Lua’s own lua.h to include this declaration, as I believe lua/lua54/lua.h does currently. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think lua_gc_compat is part of any Lua 5.4x release.

[aarzilli]

It doesn't matter if there's an extra declaration in lua.h or not.