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

What is RAII?

This chapter is all about resource management. A resource can be a piece of memory, an opened file, or a network socket. Although in this chapter we have only used memory management as examples, the principles for all resources are the same.

Of course, all acquired resources need to be released. In C++, the destructor is a good place to release resources. When working with Lua, the Lua finalizer is a good trigger to release resources.

Resource Acquisition is Initialization, or RAII, is a useful resource management idiom. This means object creation and acquiring the resources the object needs should be an atomic operation – everything should succeed, or the partially acquired resources should be released before raising an error.

By using this technique, the resources are also linked with the object’s life cycle. This ensures that all resources are guaranteed to be available during the life cycle of the object. This will prevent complex failure scenarios...