The release archive currently extracts directly into the working directory. I'll package future releases into a dedicated top-level directory to avoid cluttering the extraction location.
Love.js is already a mature solution for running Love2D games in the browser through WebAssembly. Clx currently focuses on ahead-of-time compilation to native executables rather than web deployment.
The idea I was referring to is more about native distribution: compiling Lua code into standalone executables without requiring a Lua runtime on the target machine.
That said, if Clx eventually gains a WebAssembly backend, it could become an interesting alternative path for Lua-to-web deployment.
That's an interesting idea, but I'd probably lean towards a third-party clx module rather than adding Objective-C runtime support directly to clx.
Since clx already exposes a C++ API and is able to link clx modules, projects like metal-cpp are a natural fit and don't require any changes to the runtime, or any FFI tricks.
That keeps the core runtime small while still allowing platform-specific integrations.
Ah, that makes sense .. so I could write a clx-oriented app which chooses to load the clx-objcsend module (based on its assessment of which platform its running on of course) .. which I could then use to formulate a native GUI on MacOS/iOS.
I have a few GUI libraries I've written in Lua for other projects, which depend basically on having surface-manipulation and event-management functions from the native platform available .. I might have a go at porting these once I dive a bit deeper into clx. I've used other Lua-based engines in the past to accomplish a 'one codebase/GUI runs on all platforms' target in the past, but those engines have faded away - mostly due to the dependency on LuaJIT and the subsequent brickwalling of JIT in iOS, where the apps were making their revenue - so having clx at hand is an exciting opportunity .. assuming I can get the GUI code ported in a way that it is functional on at least the major platforms .. will ping you on GitHub if I make some progress on this, I've been meaning to bring the GUI code from those older projects into the modern context, and clx may well be the way to do it ..
This is exactly the kind of scenario where I think third-party clx modules make sense: keep the core runtime portable and let platform-specific bindings live outside of it.
A clx-objc (or metal-cpp or any gui backend) module would be an interesting experiment, and the same approach could apply to other platforms (Win32, GTK, etc.)
Clx is still a relatively young project, so please be a bit indulgent with bugs or missing features, but I'd definitely be interested in seeing/helping what you build!
I'll join you in Github once I've got a chance to catch up with clx so far .. with the work you've already done, I think the basics are there to support multi-platform GUI modules .. but I'll know more about the effort once I catch up with you. Great work!
I'd be very interested in your feedback once you've had a chance to explore the codebase. Multi-platform GUI support is definitely something I'd like to see emerge through Clx binary modules and the C++ API.
Feel free to reach out on GitHub when you're ready — additional platform expertise would be greatly appreciated.
- clx compiles directly from Lua source code. It has its own parser and C++20 code generator; it does not use Lua bytecode
- The goal isn't necessarily to beat Lua, but some workloads benefit from the optimizations performed by modern C++ compilers.
As for tables, clx doesn't use a naive boxed-object model. Tables have a split array/hash layout: integer keys are stored in a contiguous array, while other keys use an open-addressed hash table. That keeps common accesses cache-friendly and avoids a lot of pointer chasing.
loadfile() isn't implemented in clx, and neither are the other dynamic code-loading features. Supporting them would require runtime code interpretation, which doesn't fit clx's current AOT model.
Could that change one day? Maybe, but it's not a priority right now.
I looked at your goals and Load is clearly out of scope. I think the question here is could you load your AOT compiled and executable code like we do with Lua scripts only give the compiled code access to a safe Lua env. i.e. Not giving it access to all symbols.
Loading precompiled CLX modules is a different problem though. In theory, a native module could be loaded and executed with a restricted environment, similar to how Lua modules receive a specific `_ENV`.
It's not something CLX supports today, but it's much closer to the project's goals than runtime compilation of Lua source code.
One challenge is that standard Lua does not provide a way to change a function's `_ENV` after compilation (unlike the old `setfenv/getfenv` mechanism from Lua 5.1).
I've been considering adding environment manipulation capabilities to the CLX C++ API (while keeping Lua compatibility intact). If that happens, loading CLX modules into custom environments could become relatively straightforward.
I wasn't familiar with Shedskin, I'll take a look !
The optimization I'm most proud of is native type specialization when possible, allowing many values to stay as int64_t or double instead of generic slow Lua values.
As for eval, Clx is fully ahead-of-time compiled. Supporting it would require embedding an interpreter in the runtime and use an interface with Clx... making it significantly larger and going against the idea of compiling everything ahead of time.
For dynamic code execution, the Lua interpreter is probably the better tool.
Yes, game development is one of the use cases I had in mind. Since Clx is fully ahead-of-time compiled, it avoids the JIT restrictions present on iOS and relies on the platform's normal native toolchain.
But Clx currently only supports Linux, Windows and macOS, including Apple Silicon. I haven't tested it on iOS yet, so I can't claim iOS support at this stage.
The main motivation wasn't a particular C++20 feature, but using GCC, Clang and MSVC as a portable optimization and code generation backend instead of LLVM or custom machine code generation.
As for coroutines, no. Clx doesn't use C++20 coroutines because Lua coroutines are stackful, so the runtime uses platform-specific context switching instead.
I'm thrilled to announce the latest version of rtc, a standalone tool that compiles your Lua 5.4.8 scripts into native Windows .exe applications—no Makefile, no C compiler, and no Lua installation required.
But here’s the real game-changer: rtc supports full static compilation, meaning you can embed Lua binary modules directly into your executable—and they’ll load seamlessly via require() just like regular Lua files. This opens the door to packaging powerful native extensions without worrying about external dependencies.
Static Lua binary modules need just to be recompiled with the lua54-static.lib library from LuaRT distribution (rtc is coded using LuaRT).
Here are the main features :
- Standalone tool – No Makefile or external compiler needed
The release archive currently extracts directly into the working directory. I'll package future releases into a dedicated top-level directory to avoid cluttering the extraction location.