On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 10:30 AM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.com wrote:
The approach taken on Scribunto, though -- forking out a bundled lua binary -- works even on shared hosting. I've even managed to get it working on GoDaddy's notorious hosting.
Works on *some* shared hosting.
We had problems for a while where many people with shared hosting running CentOS 5 couldn't run the provided binaries because their glibc was too old. Finally I installed CentOS 5 in VirtualBox and recompiled Lua against the older glibc.
And then there are the shared hosts that mount the users' directories with 'noexec', or that add proc_open to disable_functions in php.ini, or the like. There's nothing we can do for them.
Also note that the "bundled binaries" solution won't help much if you need to shell out to something like nodejs.[1] In that case you'd probably have to go with requiring the end user to download and install nodejs separately.
[1]: Lua binaries for Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux (32- and 64-bit), and OS X Lion total 1.3M. A similar set of nodejs binaries downloaded from nodejs.org totals 42M, which would be a lot to bundle. And yes, that's just the binaries and not all the other files included in the "binary" tar.gz.