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

Multithreading in C++

What is multithreading?

There are a few definitions, depending on the point of view. From the CPU’s perspective, a multi-core processor that can execute multiple threads of instructions concurrently is real multithreading. From an application’s perspective, using multiple threads is multithreading. From a developer’s perspective, more focus might be on thread safety and various synchronization mechanisms, which are not multithreading itself, but its implications.

In this section, we will learn how to use Lua with C++’s native multithreading support. Each C++ thread will have its own Lua state. Because the Lua library does not keep any state and Lua states are not shared among different threads, this is thread-safe.

How does C++ support multithreading?

Since C++11, the standard library supports multithreading with std::thread. Each std::thread instance represents a thread of execution. The most important thing to provide...