README

Lua AOT compiler. A modified Lua virtual machine that can compile Lua code to C code.


How to use:
  1) Run the Makefile inside the src directory
  2) Run configure inside the experiments directory
  3) Run the Makefile inside the experiments directory
  4) Run the programs using the `run` and `runbenchmarks` scripts.

- src/ contains a modified Lua VM and the luaot compiler that generated a C
  module from a Lua source file

  The LuaVM has very few modifications. Basically, an extra field in Proto and
  some private functions were made public. In theory the Lua module could have
  been converted to an equivalent C module that is indistinguishable if you
  `require` it. But the current implementation is a lot more hacky than that.
  At the moment, you are expected to load the C module with `lua -l module.so`
  and the C module exposes on the global scope a `magic` function that can
  modify a given Lua closure to use an optimized C implementation. For example,
  `magic(1, f)` changes f to that when f is called it runs the code from the
  1st pre-compiled function from the C module. It is your responsibility to
  make sure that the indices match.

- experiments/ has all the test files for my experiments

  The lua files in the examples folders are converted to c files and then compiled
  to "so" dynamic libraries. The ./configure.py generates a makefile for everything.
  
  Use the `run` file to do a standalone test. Take a look inside to see how things work
  
     ./run examples/foo.lua          # normal version
     ./run examples/foo.lua --fast   # optimized version

  The runbenchmarks is the script from https://github.com/gligneul/Lua-Low-Level, but with
  some tweaks to get everything to run.
  


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Original README:

This is Lua 5.3.4, released on 12 Jan 2017.

For installation instructions, license details, and
further information about Lua, see doc/readme.html.