Build Standalone Lua Applications with Zig and =fnlpack=

rprior@protonmail.com (Ryan Prior) — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:34:04 +0000

I built a standalone binary distribution for technomancy/search, which is a small search engine written in the Fennel programming language. I'm excited to tell you about it because search is not historically an example of an application that would be easy to turn into a standalone binary, because while search itself is pretty simple on the surface, the parts it's built out of hide layers of complexity. The work I've done is to build some tools that simplify those parts so that the whole thing goes together nicely. Those tools are fnlpack, which turns the scripts in a Fennel/Lua application like search into a single file; and a native build system using Zig to take that file, plus the runtime and libraries search depends upon, and turns them into a standalone binary.

Fennel on Ryan Prior

Build Standalone Lua Applications with Zig and =fnlpack=