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

Summary

With that, we have wrapped up the final chapter of this book. In this chapter, we focused on multithreading mechanisms, preemptive multithreading and cooperative multithreading, and Lua coroutines.

Lua coroutines can be used without C++ for advanced Lua programming and you can hide all these details from C++. We only touched the tip of the iceberg. You can read the Lua reference manual and practice more. You can also explore more on how to use coroutines with C++ by experimenting with the related Lua library functions.

In this book, we implemented LuaExecutor progressively. Each chapter added more features to it. However, it is not perfect. For example, LuaValue can be improved to make it easier to work with, and LuaExecutor can support more table operations. You can use LuaExecutor as a base and adapt it to your project or implement your own in a completely different way after you have learned the mechanisms.

I am confident that at this point, you can make improvements...