How to compile Lua 5.3.5 for Windows

Tuesday, June 25th, 2019 | Dennis D. Spreen | Lua, Windows

This is a tutorial on how to compile Lua 5.3.5 for Windows (executable and DLL) with Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition.

This tutorial on how to build Lua for Windows is based on the great video How to Manually Install Lua 5.2 on Windows – thank you!

You may download the latest pre-compiled Lua libraries and executables at http://luabinaries.sourceforge.net

1. Download and install Visual Studio Community Edition 2019 – do not use any older/newer version (haven’t tested them)

2. Download and extract the Lua 5.3.5 source code

3. Open a x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019, navigate to the extracted Lua src/ folder and run inside this folder the following commands

cl /MD /O2 /c /DLUA_BUILD_AS_DLL *.c
ren lua.obj lua.o
ren luac.obj luac.o
link /DLL /IMPLIB:lua5.3.5.lib /OUT:lua5.3.5.dll *.obj
link /OUT:lua.exe lua.o lua5.3.5.lib
lib /OUT:lua5.3.5-static.lib *.obj
link /OUT:luac.exe luac.o lua5.3.5-static.lib

You’re done! You should now have a lua.exe interpreter, a luac.exe compiler and a lua5.3.0.dll.

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2 Comments to How to compile Lua 5.3.5 for Windows

Ken
October 7, 2021

This is fantastic! The instructions on the Lua website are really complicated and in some ways outdated. Thanks Dennis!

Paioniu
March 25, 2022

Hi, will the built library (using your instructions) allow dinamically loading other dll lua modules?

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About Dennis D. Spreen

I'm an avid programmer working on a variety of platforms in a variety of languages with a wide technical interest.

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