News

2013-12-01 Release 0.3.4:

• Change current working directory to the executable directory.
• Try to load Lua 5.2 then Lua 5.1 (not hard coded anymore).

2013-11-17 Release 0.3.3:

• Makefiles give you (me) better support for cross compiling (except armhf).
• Makefiles now download and compile Lua shared library for you.
• New directory structure, new icon, windows xp styles and bug fixes.

Introduction

What is it?

Lua Built-In program (L-Bia) is a self-running Lua interpreter. It turns your Lua program with all required modules (either Lua or C libraries) and an interpreter into a single stand-alone executable program.

WARNING: This version doesn't do that, it only run a lua script with the same name as the executable. I'm rewriting it due to many bugs in previous versions.

Why should I use it?

L-Bia makes the things simpler, because:

• You don't need to distribute many files
• You don't need to install or have any prior software indalled
• Runs in any computer from any media (floppies, CD-ROMs, USB sticks or other)
• Multi-platform, simple and easy to use

Please note that L-Bia turns your program into an executable program. And an executable program for Windows doesn't run on Linux or other. You need to create an executable for each platform.

So if your users are likely to always have the normal Lua interpreter installed, forget about L-Bia. But if your users are likely to not even heard about Lua, L-Bia is perfect for you.

Do I have to pay for it?

Absolutely NO! L-Bia is freely available under the terms of GNU General Public License. Contrary to popular belief, it can be used in comercial software! See #LICENSE for details. The latest version of L-Bia can be downloaded from its SourceForge page.

Supported features

• Run a lua script with the same name as the executable.

OK, I want it. Now what?

Download

The latest version of L-Bia can be downloaded from its SourceForge page.

Build and Run

You need the Free Pascal compiler. Just type fpc l-bia and you're done. But you need the appropriate Lua dynamic library.

Now l-bia run l-bia.lua, if you want to run hello.lua rename the executable to hello. They must be in same directory and also any other files needed.

Thanks

• Waldemar Celes and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, the autors of Lua, for portions of code I used in L-Bia.
• Markus Franz Xaver Johannes Oberhumer for miniLZO - mini subset of the LZO real-time data compression library.
• Aurelio Marinho Jargas for his txt2tags text formatting and conversion tool used in these docs and things I plagiarized him (plagiarism is my favorite buzzword :)
• Many tanks also to all those who sent me feedback, I realy appreciate it.

Feedback

If you have any question, comment, bug report or other send to <breno (a) br-lemes net>. I realy appreciate your feedback.