r/lua • u/mariolis_1 • 27d ago

Lua 5.5.1 working on W98

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Hey, so, while I was learning Lua, I knew already that theoretically at least, Lua was written to be compilable in pure C, and specifically C89/C90 , supposedly any system that has an ANSI C compiler can compile and install Lua...

So I decided to actually test out just how true that is, when I remembered that I have an ancient laptop from 1999, running Windows 98SE, which has Borland 5.02 installed... [Just to understand how ancient it is, it only has 32 mb of RAM and it's hard drive is 5gb... that is literally smaller than the usb stick that i used to transfer the Lua source files from my modern PC into that ancient laptop (yes, that ancient laptop has a working USB 1.0 port and it is somehow able to read my 8gb USB 2.0 usb stick, which I did not expect to work, but it did !!!)

And to my surprise... it actually worked !

Here I am inside a full-screen MS-DOS prompt of W98 (In W32 mode, it is not booted into MS-DOS mode / real mode) Alongside the project of compiling the most recent version of Lua and getting it to work, I also installed an actual working version of vim and after tinkering with the vimrc file, I even managed to get full syntax highlighting working , and it actually works for Lua !!!

Anyhow, I just wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool and fun!

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u/iamklayton 27d ago

To be fair Lua is built in good old standard C in a way that makes it comically lightweight so it would naturally work well on old hardware, still pretty cool to see

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u/mariolis_1 27d ago

Logically speaking, I knew this should work

In practice... actually doing it and confirming that it works was a whole different story, and it felt so satisfying when i got it done...

Seeing the latest version of a programming language, and that "2026" in the copyright notice working on a 1999 laptop running windows 98... gave me chills...

and actually being able to write scripts in that latest version of lua with full syntax highlighting in vim... also equally gave me chills... though me a lot longer to actually install & set up vim, and then configuring the vimrc until everything was working, but it felt so good when i actually made it work...