Ekto is a fork of Lua 5.1-4

The default version of Lua produces byte code, that is platform and architecture dependent. Ekto gets rid of this dependency by using an interchangeable byte code format for precompiled Lua scripts.

If you need to distribute Lua scripts in a binary byte format to hosts of different platform and architecture, then Ekto is the right thing for you.

There is only one way to distribute Lua scripts with the standard version, and that's in plain text. But plain text has to be fed through the lexer and parser, before the code can be executed. Precompiled byte code is much faster to load, and with Ekto this is now possible across platforms and architectures.

The difference between Ekto and Lua is only the dumping and undumping of byte code, which takes care of 16bit vs. 32bit vs. 64bit and little vs. big endian. The rest is the same.