https://www.lua.org/manual/5.5/readme.html#changes
Lua Welcome to Lua 5.5
about * installation * changes * license * reference manual
About Lua
Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting
language developed by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua is free software used in
many products and projects around the world.
Lua's official website provides complete information about Lua,
including an executive summary, tips on getting started, and updated
documentation, especially the reference manual, which may differ
slightly from the local copy distributed in this package.
Installing Lua
Lua is distributed in source form. You need to build it before using
it. Building Lua should be straightforward because Lua is implemented
in pure ISO C and compiles unmodified in all known platforms that
have an ISO C compiler. Lua also compiles unmodified as C++. The
instructions given below for building Lua are for Unix-like
platforms, such as Linux and macOS. See also instructions for other
systems and customization options.
If you don't have the time or the inclination to compile Lua
yourself, get a binary from LuaBinaries.
Building Lua
In most common Unix-like platforms, simply do "make". Here are the
details.
1. Open a terminal window and move to the top-level directory, which
is named lua-5.5.0. The Makefile there controls both the build
process and the installation process.
2. Do "make". The Makefile will guess your platform and build Lua
for it.
3. If the guess failed, do "make help" and see if your platform is
listed. The platforms currently supported are:
guess aix bsd c89 freebsd generic ios linux macosx mingw posix
solaris
If your platform is listed, just do "make xxx", where xxx is your
platform name.
If your platform is not listed, try the closest one or posix,
generic, c89, in this order.
4. The compilation takes only a few moments and produces three files
in the src directory: lua (the interpreter), luac (the compiler),
and liblua.a (the library).
5. To check that Lua has been built correctly, do "make test" after
building Lua. This will run the interpreter and print its
version.
Installing Lua
Once you have built Lua, you may want to install it in an official
place in your system. In this case, do "make install". The official
place and the way to install files are defined in the Makefile.
You'll probably need the right permissions to install files, and so
may need to do "sudo make install".
To build and install Lua in one step, do "make all install", or "make
xxx install", where xxx is your platform name.
To install Lua locally after building it, do "make local". This will
create a directory install with subdirectories bin, include, lib,
man, share, and install Lua as listed below. To install Lua locally,
but in some other directory, do "make install INSTALL_TOP=xxx", where
xxx is your chosen directory. The installation starts in the src and
doc directories, so take care if INSTALL_TOP is not an absolute path.
bin:
lua luac
include:
lua.h luaconf.h lualib.h lauxlib.h lua.hpp
lib:
liblua.a
man/man1:
lua.1 luac.1
These are the only directories you need for development. If you only
want to run Lua programs, you only need the files in bin and man. The
files in include and lib are needed for embedding Lua in C or C++
programs.
Customization
Three kinds of things can be customized by editing a file:
* Where and how to install Lua -- edit Makefile.
* How to build Lua -- edit src/Makefile.
* Lua features -- edit src/luaconf.h.
You don't actually need to edit the Makefiles because you may set the
relevant variables in the command line when invoking make.
Nevertheless, it's probably best to edit and save the Makefiles to
record the changes you've made.
On the other hand, if you need to customize some Lua features, edit
src/luaconf.h before building and installing Lua. The edited file
will be the one installed, and it will be used by any Lua clients
that you build, to ensure consistency. Further customization is
available to experts by editing the Lua sources.
Building Lua on other systems
If you're not using the usual Unix tools, then the instructions for
building Lua depend on the compiler you use. You'll need to create
projects (or whatever your compiler uses) for building the library,
the interpreter, and the compiler, as follows:
library:
lapi.c lcode.c lctype.c ldebug.c ldo.c ldump.c lfunc.c lgc.c
llex.c lmem.c lobject.c lopcodes.c lparser.c lstate.c lstring.c
ltable.c ltm.c lundump.c lvm.c lzio.c lauxlib.c lbaselib.c
lcorolib.c ldblib.c liolib.c lmathlib.c loadlib.c loslib.c
lstrlib.c ltablib.c lutf8lib.c linit.c
interpreter:
library, lua.c
compiler:
library, luac.c
To use Lua as a library in your own programs, you need to know how to
create and use libraries with your compiler. Moreover, to dynamically
load C libraries for Lua, you'll need to know how to create dynamic
libraries and you'll need to make sure that the Lua API functions are
accessible to those dynamic libraries -- but don't link the Lua
library into each dynamic library. For Unix, we recommend that the
Lua library be linked statically into the host program and its
symbols exported for dynamic linking; src/Makefile does this for the
Lua interpreter. For Windows, we recommend that the Lua library be a
DLL. In all cases, the compiler luac should be linked statically.
As mentioned above, you may edit src/luaconf.h to customize some
features before building Lua.
Changes since Lua 5.4
Here are the main changes introduced in Lua 5.5. The reference manual
lists the incompatibilities that had to be introduced.
Main changes
* declarations for global variables
* for-loop variables are read only
* floats are printed in decimal with enough digits to be read back
correctly.
* more levels for constructors
* table.create
* utf8.offset returns also final position of character
* external strings (that use memory not managed by Lua)
* new functions luaL_openselectedlibs and luaL_makeseed
* major garbage collections done incrementally
* more compact arrays (large arrays use about 60% less memory)
* lua.c loads 'readline' dynamically
* static (fixed) binaries (when loading a binary chunk in memory,
Lua can reuse its original memory in some of the internal
structures)
* dump and undump reuse all strings
* auxiliary buffer reuses buffer when it creates final string
License
[Open Source Initiative Approved License] Lua is free software
distributed under the terms of the MIT license reproduced below; it
may be used for any purpose, including commercial purposes, at
absolutely no cost without having to ask us. The only requirement is
that if you do use Lua, then you should give us credit by including
the appropriate copyright notice somewhere in your product or its
documentation. For details, see the license page.
Copyright (c) 1994-2025 Lua.org, PUC-Rio.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Last update: Wed Dec 10 11:37:23 UTC 2025