Book Image

Integrate Lua with C++

By : Wenhuan Li
Book Image

Integrate Lua with C++

By: Wenhuan Li

Overview of this book

C++ is a popular choice in the developer community for building complex and large-scale performant applications and systems. Often a need arises to extend the system at runtime, without recompiling the whole C++ program. Using a scripting language like Lua can help achieve this goal efficiently. Integrate Lua to C++ is a comprehensive guide to integrating Lua to C++ and will enable you to achieve the goal of extending C++ programs at runtime. You’ll learn, in sequence, how to get and compile the Lua library, the Lua programming language, calling Lua code from C++, and calling C++ code from Lua. In each topic, you’ll practice with code examples, and learn the in-depth mechanisms for smooth working. Throughout the book, the latter examples build on the earlier ones while also acting as a standalone. You’ll learn to implement Lua executor and Lua binding generator, which you can use in your projects directly with further customizations. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered integrating Lua into C++ and using Lua in your C++ project efficiently, gained the skills to extend your applications at runtime, and achieved dynamic and adaptable C++ development.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1 – Lua Basics
4
Part 2 – Calling Lua from C++
8
Part 3 – Calling C++ from Lua
12
Part 4 – Advanced Topics

Designing a type exporter

First, let us define our scope. We want to generalize the factory we have just made and make it work with any C++ class – that is, the C++ class still needs to implement and provide the lua_CFunction wrappers in some way. It is possible to automate the creation of those wrappers, but that would require implementing a heavy C++ template library, which is not strictly related to Lua and is out of the scope of this book.

With the scope defined, let us make some high-level designs.

Choosing a design pattern

When we talk about making something general in C++, usually it means we need to use templates. To work with our Lua executor, we need to export LuaModule. So, we need to implement the exporter as a template class that can provide LuaModule.

How can we provide LuaModule? We can make the exporter inherit from the LuaModule interface, or make one of its member functions return LuaModule.

One of the popular design patterns for the latter option...