Alien - Pure Lua extensions =========================== For more information, see http://mascarenhas.github.com/alien. What is Alien? -------------- Alien is a Foreign Function Interface (FFI) for Lua. An FFI lets you call functions in dynamic libraries (.so, .dylib, .dll, etc.) from Lua code without having to write, compile and link a C binding from the library to Lua. In other words, it lets you write extensions that call native code using just Lua. Alien works on Unix-based systems and Windows. It has been tested on Linux/x86, Linux/x64, Linux/ARM, FreeBSD/x86, Windows/x86, OS X/x86, and OS X/PPC. The Windows binary uses MSVCR80.DLL for compatibility with LuaBinaries. Installing Alien ---------------- The best way to install Alien is through [LuaRocks](http://luarocks.org): just do `luarocks install alien`. Alien is based on libffi. On a GNU/Linux system you should be able to install it with your package manager; it is probably called something like `libffi-dev` (Debian, Ubuntu etc.) or `libffi-devel` (Fedora, CentOS etc.). If your system's package manager does not have libffi, or you don't have a package manager, you can get the source code from [the libffi project](http://sources.redhat.com/libffi/). Alien uses the GNU build system. For detailed instructions, see INSTALL. For a quick start: [If using git sources: ./bootstrap ] ./configure && make [&& make install] You may need to supply non-default paths (e.g. if you are using a system that supports more than one version of Lua): For example, on Debian or Ubuntu: LUA=lua5.1 CPPFLAGS='-I/usr/include/lua5.1' ./configure --libdir=/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1 --datadir=/usr/local/share/lua/5.1 To run some tests: make check Credits ------- Alien is designed and implemented by Fabio Mascarenhas. It uses the great [libffi](http://sourceware.org/libffi) library by Anthony Green (and others) to do the heavy lifting of calling to and from C. The name was stolen from Common Lisp FFIs. License ------- Alien uses the MIT license (the same as Lua).