VersionNotice: The LuaCheia project is apparently dead. That is the suggestion from these two mail list posts: [1][2] There doesn't seem to be any activity either (since version 4 or 5). This is page is maintained here for historical reference (e.g. the book Beginning Lua Programming mentions LuaCheia).
Lua is a great programming language that prides itself on ANSI C portability, small size, simplicity and ease of embedding. Due to these goals, the official Lua distribution cannot provide features common to popular stand-alone scripting languages. With the LuaCheia project, we wish to make a full-featured language based on Lua that makes it more usable as a stand-alone language. Lua cheia is Portuguese for full moon.
Portable and ported to Apple OS X, POSIX/X Window System and Microsoft Windows platforms. Use GNU autoconf to support automatic building on a wide variety of systems.
Standard binary distributions for the supported platforms. One-stop shopping for users interested in experimenting with Lua, or using it for general-purpose scripting.
Modularity. Only a very small core is mandatory, which is essentially the stock official Lua 5 distribution with bug patches. LuaCheia is implemented as a wrapper and bootscript around the normal stand-alone Lua executable. The wrapper can easily be pointed at a modified Lua interpreter if you like to experiment with the core itself.
Incorporate many different useful libraries.
Libraries are loaded dynamically so the core stays small.
The following libraries are included, or being considered for
inclusion in LuaCheia:
LuaBinaryModules: as basis for loading Lua extensions. (working)
GluaX: Dynamic loading of libraries. (working)
SDL: Has threading, graphics support, and is useful for gaming applications of Lua. (working, but no thread support, correct?)
wxWindows as the primary heavyweight GUI library, possibly FLTK as a lightweight alternative. (semi-working on Win32, not enabled by default)
SQLite: Lightweight SQL without server. (working)
Lua sockets. (working)
PCRE -- Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. (working, disabled by default in favor of rex)
rex -- POSIX & PCRE regex library by ReubenThomas. (working)
bit -- bit manipulation library by ReubenThomas. (working)
pack -- binary structure packing/unpacking based on lhf's packlib. (working)
posix -- POSIX wrapper library by lhf. (working)
cgi -- Assistance for CGI, web-based programming. (working)
XML handling. expat would be a commomn choice, but expat is not a really complete XML lib (no validation etc.) Libraries like libxml2 would be more powerfull (DOM, XSLT, XPath) and are under MIT license but are slightly large, maybe also Sablotron (lighter)?
mapm -- arbitrary precision math (based on lhf's binding of MAPM) (working)
precompiled Tk binaries originated from Tcl/Tk 8.4. Useful for Tcl/Tk programmers who want to switch to Lua. Alas, Tklua is not maintained a couple of years (Rob Maris).
intergrate a image library like [imlib] or the [FreeImage]. (FreeImage? is dual licensed under the GPL and its own odd license.), or also [GD] or [Lua-GD]
