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

Customizing Lua memory allocation

In the Lua runtime, memory is allocated, reallocated, or deallocated in the heap in the following situations:

  • Memory is allocated: This happens when an object is created. Lua needs to allocate a piece of memory to hold it.
  • Memory is reallocated: This happens when the size of an object needs to be changed – for example, adding entries to a table when the table has no more pre-allocated space.
  • Memory is deallocated: This happens during garbage collection when the object is no longer needed.

In most situations, you do not need to be concerned about this. But sometimes, it is helpful to get an insight into, or customize, the Lua memory allocation. Here are some examples:

  • You need to analyze the memory footprint of your Lua objects to find optimization opportunities.
  • You need to customize where the memory is allocated. For example, to increase runtime efficiency, you may have a memory pool and you can simply have...