Re: Patch to Add Lua Support

[Ken Smith]

Has anyone had a chance to look at this patch?  If you've ever wished
GNU make had Guile support, then this patch may be very interesting to
you.  Lua is easy to learn and offers a fairly complete basic library.

Have you ever wanted to do math in GNU make?  The GMSL can do an
impressive set of basic math but imagine if, instead of writing

 x := $(call int_decode,$(call int_divide,$(call
int_encode,15),$(call int_encode,3)))

you could write this

 $(info x=$(lua printmake(15/3)))

And that is only the beginning.  With Lua support, you can use hash
tables to store and manilpuate information, you can express
complicated functions with ease, and still keep your build files neat.

To the GNU make maintainers:
Please let me know what you need me to do to get this patch accepted
into the next release.

To the GNU make community:
Please check out

 http://lua.org

and apply this patch to GNU make 3.81.  One of the biggest gripes
people have with GNU make is that its language isn't as expressive as
they want.  Hence SCons and the slew of other make replacements.  I
think make does one thing and does it well; it manages dependencies.
So let's leverage make's power to manage dependencies and leave the
heavy lifting up to a drop in language like Lua.

 Ken

On 10/15/06, Ken Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Please consider this patch a request for comments.  I have added Lua
> 5.1.1 support to GNU make 3.81.  Attached to this email are patches
> for two files.  The patch for  function.c should work for any
> platform.  The patches for the Makefile were generated under Darwin
> and Linux.  Both are included to give a bigger picture to the nature
> of the changes required to build this patch.  You may have to modify
> your Makefile by hand to get this patch to build and/or link.  This is
> just to get you up and running since, if this patch is accepted, the
> autoconf processing would need to be modified to properly support
> linking to Lua.
>
> Readers of this list may know that you can apply these patches with
> the following steps.
>
>   tar xjvf make-3.81.tar.bz2
>   cd make-3.81
>   ./configure
>   patch -p1 < make-3.81-lua-5.1.1-Makefile.patch
>   patch -p1 < make-3.81-lua-5.1.1-function.c.patch
>
> The attached GNUmakefile will produce something akin to the following
> output when run with a patched GNU make 3.81.
>
>   Detected Lua support.
>   lua result = "5"
>   Make is 3.81 or later.
>   Hello from Lua (x = table: 0x305380)
>
>   t.1 = 4
>   t.2 = 5
>   t.something_else = true
>   t.x.1 = 1
>   t.x.2 = 2
>   t.x.3 = 3
>   t.hi = value
>
>   Terminado.
>
> This patch requires Lua 5.1.1 to be installed but requires no
> modifications to the Lua codebase.  The patch adds one function to
> Lua's global namespace, "printmake", which prints a string back to
> make rather than to stdout.  You can use $(lua printmake('text')) like
> you would use $(shell echo 'text').
>
> This patch was developed under Darwin 8.8.1 (Mac OS X 10.4.8 Intel).
>
>   Ken