How are you handling libc? you have your own (or is this even an issue with Lua)? I've been thinking of putting a Common Lisp implementation on bare metal (initially thinking of SBCL, but I think MKCL may be a easier challenge), but haven't found the time to start yet.

I've grabbed the missing routines from musl libc (and culled some parts of the Lua standard library for the sake of reducing the number of requirements, e.g. io.*), and used venerable Doug Lea's malloc for memory allocations.

The stock Lua 5.1 has the least number of dependencies, so I picked it - the idea is to practice and then to eventually have LuaJIT run on bare metal.

Good luck with it. You are on the path of having Smalltalk. :)

Can't edit the old answer, so adding a new one...

I found this: https://code.google.com/p/lualisp/ - could be fun to get it atop. I'll see next time when I am in the mood for hacking on it.

You can use the NetBSD rump kernel [1] to do this relatively easily - I have run LuaJIT on Xen using this and there is now a bare metal implementation too.

[1] http://rumpkernel.org/

Actually your https://github.com/justincormack/rumpuser-xen was the original inspiration for me :-)

Back when I started (sometime in May), rump did not run on "bare metal" yet, so I decided to reinvent a bicycle of my own.

Also, looks like it's running in 32-bit mode ?