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Lua with CMake Support

Almost unaltered Lua source code and documentation with CMake build infrastructure. This repository contains different Lua versions extracted from https://www.lua.org/download.html. 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

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 https://github.com/OneLuaPro/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-<VERSION> 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%;<INSTALL_PREFIX>\lua-<VERSION>\bin"

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

C:\Users\John Doe>lua
Lua 5.5.0  Copyright (C) 1994-2025 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> print(_VERSION)
Lua 5.5
>
C:\Users\John Doe>

Extras

In addition to the standard Lua executables lua.exe and luac.exe, a third binary is built: wlua.exe. This executable is functionally identical to lua.exe but is compiled for a different Windows subsystem (Windows GUI instead of Console). This is particularly useful for Lua-based GUI applications, as it prevents the annoying empty terminal window from appearing in the background. Lua GUI applications can be launched using a batch file as follows:

@echo off
pushd "%~dp0"
start "" wlua.exe "%~dp0prog.lua" %*
popd
exit

License

See https://github.com/OneLuaPro/lua/blob/main/LICENSE.