Hello, TL;DR: Could building LuaMetaTeX with the `-fPIC` flag for the Lua library have negative consequences? Is there a better way to be able to call external C functions from ConTeXt? I am working on a small project where it would be convenient to call functions written in C (possibly pre-compiled in a shared library) from ConTeXt. After looking at the Lua FFI, I found a way that seems to work (with ConTeXt LMTX 2024-08-16) but requires a small tweak to the cmake file used for building the Lua library. I would be grateful to have the opinion of people more knowledgeable than I am about whether this change could have negative consequences and whether there is a more straightforward way to call external C code. What I am trying to achieve is: * Compile some C code in a shared library (for instance, it may contain a numerical solver for some partial differential equation). * Have this code run when compiling a document with ConTeXt. (For instance, solving the differential equation with parameters defined in the .tex file and retrieving the results to plot a figure with MetaPost.) One easy way to do that is: * Write wrappers for the functions that will need to be called from ConTeXt using the Lua C API. * Compile the code and wrappers in a shared library and linking to the static lua library used by LuaMetaTeX (liblua.a on Linux). * In the .tex file, import the new library using, e.g., ``` \startluacode mylib = require("mylib") -- additional code using the C functions \stopluacode ``` * Run ConTeXt with the `--permitloadlib` flag. However, the second step requires (at least on Linux) liblua.a to be compiled with the `-fPIC` flag. I could do that by adding ``` set_property(TARGET lua PROPERTY POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE ON) ``` at line 47 in lua.cmake. Is there any known negative effect of doing that (apart from a possible small performance drop)? (Just to be clear, this is not a feature request; I'm just wondering whether doing it on my side is fine.) On a related note, is there a standard way to call external C functions (either in a shared library or in a .c file) from ConTeXt LMTX? The SwigLib library described in https://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/swiglib-mkiv.pdf looks very promising (and maybe could be a way to achieve what I'm trying to do in a much cleaner way), but I (maybe for lack of trying hard enough) have not been able to make it work with ConTeXt LMTX so far. Best regards, Florent