About

This is a modified version of the Luvi Lua runtime, primarily with the goal of iterating on various ideas and experimentating in an isolated environment.

The runtime is built to serve my own needs first and foremost, which may or may not be of interest to anyone else. It's a work-in-progress and likely never finished.

If you aren't familiar: Luvi provides a Lua environment based on the LuaJIT compiler, with builtin C libraries like libuv, OpenSSL and miniz. Luvi also includes facilities to create self-contained executables from your Lua scripts and serves as a foundation for the luvit runtime, which are inherited by this variant.

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For more information, see the Luvi README

Not all sections still apply to this fork, but the foundations are the same.

Changes from Luvi

Evo (formerly evo-luvi) differs in various ways from the original luvi runtime.

Here are the high-level differences (list is not exhaustive):

• Path resolution is built in (via ported code from V8 & NodeJS)
• A new import mechanism to load Lua modules by relative paths or from within a .evo module folder, using GitHub-style package organization (@owner/packageName syntax similar to npm scopes)
• Includes inspect.lua as a builtin extension to aid debugging
• Primarily uses the Ninja build system instead of a jungle of CMake files
• Many new APIs, globals, and other utilities (added on an as-needed basis)
• Focus on tests and refactoring to pay off some technical debt

Whether these and other changes are good ideas, only time will tell :)

Compatibility

Evo is fully compatible with:

• PUC Lua 5.1
• LuaJIT (latest)

It is generally incompatible with:

• PUC Lua 5.2, 5.3, or 5.4 (though some 5.2 and 5.3 APIs are supported)
• Any LuaJIT fork that strays too far from upstream (it's dangerous out there!)
• Embedded Lua(u) environments, like those found in games (ROBLOX, WOW, ...)

The primary platforms I am officially supporting are those I actively use:

• Windows 10 (or higher, x64 only)
• Linux (Ubuntu-like, on x64 desktop)
• Mac OS is also covered via the CI, but I don't have one anymore

Things should still work on other platforms, if supported by all dependencies, but YMMV and there may be unforeseen issues (aren't there always?).

More Documentation

The documentation website (work in progress) can be found here:

• https://evo-lua.github.io/

If something's outdated, wrong, or missing, please open an issue here!

Licensing Information

See License.txt - it's Apache 2.0 (as inherited from Luvi).

Third-party dependencies may have differing (compatible) licenses.