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

Compiling the Lua source code

There are many ways to access the Lua language. If you are using Linux, you can install Lua for development with the distribution’s package manager. For Windows, you can also find prebuilt binaries. However, since our goal is to integrate Lua into your C++ project, instead of using it as a standalone interpreter, it’s best to build from the source code yourself. When studying Lua, this will help you learn more about Lua. For example, in a modern code editor, Visual Studio Code included, you can easily check the declaration and implementation of Lua library functions.

In this section, we will focus on compiling Lua from its source code. Unarchive the downloaded Lua source code archive. Most compression tools support this, and the Lua download site also gives instructions. When you have done this, you will see a simple folder structure:

lua-5.4.6 % ls
Makefile README doc src

We will learn what the preceding code block does in the next...