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 Lua

To understand multithreading in Lua, let’s begin with a fundamental question.

How does Lua support multithreading?

Lua does not support multithreading. Period.

But we cannot finish this section yet. We will explain this further with two approaches – a contemporary one and an old-school one.

The contemporary approach

Lua is a scripting language and it does not support preemptive multithreading. It simply does not provide a library function to create a new thread, so there is no way to do it.

Nowadays, CPUs and operating systems are designed around preemptive multithreading – that is, a thread of execution can be paused and resumed at any time. A thread has no control over its execution schedule.

However, Lua provides a mechanism for cooperative multithreading with coroutines. In a cooperative multithreading environment, the thread of execution is never preempted. Only when the thread willingly gives up its execution can...