Question

I have embedded Lua on Win32 in my project by means of statically linking it in (no, I can’t switch to DLL). I would like to bundle more Lua extensions that use native code – not just pure .lua files. Specifically, I want to bundle Steve Donovan’s winapi which comes as some lua files and some .c files.

How to do it?

Answer 1

You need to do two things. First, you have to compile the Lua DLL projects into non-DLL projects. Since they’re intended to be DLL modules, they probably won’t have provisions for this in their build systems. That means you have to do it yourself. Get rid of the DLL main functions and other specialized DLL functions (but take note of what they do and make sure you replicate it if it’s important). And make sure that you change any #defines that try to include Lua with dynamic linking.

All Lua module DLLs export one or more functions of the form luaopen_*, where * is the name of the module to load. This function will likely be decorated with declspec() notation. Typically, the notation is done via a preprocessor macro, but it may not be. Either way, remove it, turning it into a normal function declaration.

Now, once you have created your lua_State object, just call that luaopen_* function with your lua_State.