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

Implementing standalone C++ modules

So far in this book, we have only explicitly registered C++ modules to Lua in C++ code. However, there is another way to provide a C++ module to Lua.

You can produce a shared library for a module and place it in Lua’s search path. When the Lua code requires the module, Lua will load the shared library automatically.

By reusing our Destinations class, this is simple to implement. Create a file named DestinationsModule.cpp and fill it exactly as follows:

#include "Destinations.h"
#include "LuaModuleExporter.hpp"
#include <lua.hpp>
namespace {
    LuaModuleExporter module =
        LuaModuleExporter<Destinations>::make(
            DestinationsLuaModuleDef::def);
}
extern "C" {
int luaopen_destinations(lua_State *L)
{
    lua_createtable(L, 0, module.luaRegs...