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

Defining LuaModuleDef

First, we need to provide the name of the module and then the __index metatable. Finally, we need to provide a name for the metatable. Recall that in Destinations.cc, the name of the metatable is hardcoded as follows:

const std::string METATABLE_NAME(
    "Destinations.Metatable");

Now, this needs to be passed to the exporter. Let us define a structure for the aforementioned three pieces of information. In LuaModule.h, add the following declaration:

template <typename T>
struct LuaModuleDef
{
    const std::string moduleName;
    const std::vector<luaL_Reg> moduleRegs;
    const std::string metatableName() const
    {
        return std::string(moduleName)
            .append(".Metatable");
    }
};

This...