Lua370

Lua370 is a port of the Lua 5.4 scripting engine for IBM MVS 3.8j, originally created by Michael Dean Rayborn. It provides both a standalone interpreter (LUA) and bytecode compiler (LUAC) as MVS load modules, and an embeddable C library (liblua370.a) for building Lua into other MVS programs (e.g. an HTTPD CGI). It runs on Hercules-emulated systems.

This project is maintained as part of the mvslovers community.

Features

• Standalone LUA interpreter and LUAC bytecode compiler (load modules)
• Embeddable C library (liblua370.a) for other MVS C applications (e.g. HTTPD CGI)
• Full Lua 5.4 language support (C89 mode)
• Standard libraries: base, coroutine, debug, I/O, math, OS, string, table, UTF-8
• Dynamic module loading
• EBCDIC-compatible (the lexer uses LUA_USE_CTYPE=1 for EBCDIC source)

Building

Lua370 builds with mbt v2 (MVS Build Tools). The whole build runs on the host with the cc370 toolchain and produces the LUA/LUAC load modules and the static library — nothing needs to run on MVS to build it.

Prerequisites

• The cc370 host toolchain (a GCC 3.4.6 fork: cc370, as370, ar370). It also provides the libc370 sysroot (the C runtime plus racf.h / acee.h).
• Python 3.12+

Clone

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mvslovers/lua370.git
cd lua370

Build

make            # build the LUA + LUAC load modules (on the host)
make all        # the modules + the liblua370.a library archive
make deploy     # XMIT + upload + RECEIVE the modules into a LINKLIB (touches MVS)
make package    # dist/ tarballs: <ver>-load (modules) + <ver>-lib (archive + headers)
make clean      # remove build/ and dist/

Everything compiles on the host with cc370/ar370/ld370; only make deploy needs an MVS connection.

Using lua370 as a dependency

lua370 also ships an embeddable library — link it from another mbt v2 project (e.g. httplua) by declaring it in that project's project.toml:

[dependencies]
"mvslovers/lua370" = ">=1.1.0-dev"

make deps then stages liblua370.a plus the public headers (lua.h, luaconf.h, lualib.h, lauxlib.h, lua.hpp) under .mbt/deps/lua370/, and the consuming build links the archive by autocall.

Project Structure

app/          Standalone mains (lua.c -> LUA, luac.c -> LUAC)
src/          Lua 5.4 core + standard libraries (the shared core + the library)
include/      Header files (public Lua API + internals)
project.toml  mbt project definition (type = application; modules + [internal] + [lib])
Makefile      two-line include of mbt/mk/mbt.mk
mbt/          mbt build tool (git submodule)

Acknowledgments

This project was created by Michael Dean Rayborn, who has contributed several tools used within the MVS 3.8j open-source ecosystem.

Lua is originally developed by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo at PUC-Rio.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.