Lua 5.1 for Defold

A quick way to replace LuaJIT with Lua 5.1 (PUC Rio version, i.e. interpreted) on desktop platforms to run the game as on the Defold HTML5 platform.

Explanation

Defold aims to keep Lua the same across all platforms, but it currently has a few minor discrepancies in Lua language version between platforms:

Platform	Lua version	JIT Enabled
Windows	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	Yes
macOS	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	Yes
Linux	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	Yes
Android	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	Yes
iOS	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	No
Nintendo Switch	LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3	No
HTML5	Lua 5.1.4	N/A

There is a HUGE performance gap between Lua and LuaJIT. If your primary target development platform is HTML5, it's important to see the actual performance of Lua as if it were running on HTML5 while developing on a PC/Mac/Linux computer.

Usage

Add this project as a Defold library dependency. Open your game.project file and in the dependencies field under project add:

https://github.com/indiesoftby/defold-lua51/archive/main.zip

Check:

if jit then
    -- LuaJIT!
else
    -- Lua 5.1!
end

Credits

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. The implementation is extracted from the lmprof extension.