Lua for Windows

The aim of this repo is to get Lua working on Windows better. It is a newborn project so not a lot has been done so far.

What has been done?

• A solution to build Lua using Visual Studio (build-systems\visual-studio-2022)
• Improved utf8 support in the standalone interpreter

Building

First pull the repo. Lua is included as a submodule so be sure to use the recurse submodules option:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/shewitt-au/lua-windows.git

Navigate to ".\build-systems\visual-studio-2022" and load the solution (lua.sln).

There are muplitple projects:

1. "lua_dll": lua is built as a dll
2. "lua_static": lua is built as a static library
3. "luacli_dll": the standalone interpreter using lua via a dll
4. "luacli_static": the standalone interpreter statically linking to lua

Each of these has four configurations:

1. "Debug": build a debug version using C
2. "Release": build a release version using C
3. "CPP Debug": build a debug version using CPP
4. "CPP Release": build a release version using CPP

What "improved utf8" support?

Here's an example of what now works that didn't before:

./lua.exe
Lua 5.5.1  Copyright (C) 1994-2026 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> f = io.open("C:\\有問題的\\a.txt", "r")
> print(f:read("*all"))
有問題的 (problematic)

We open a file with a path and contents that contain utf8 and it works as expected on Windows.

Download executables

See releases