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

Building a C++ project with the Lua library

Building your C++ project with the Lua library has the benefit of not having to include the 100+ Lua source files in your project and your source control system. However, it has some disadvantages as well. For example, if your project needs to support multiple platforms, you will need to maintain multiple pre-compiled libraries. In such a case, building from the Lua source code might be easier.

Creating a project to work with the Lua library

In the previous section, we built the Lua library from the source code. Now, let’s extract it to use within our project.

Remember the Makefile in the root of the source code folder? Open it and you will find the two lines shown here:

TO_INC= lua.h luaconf.h lualib.h lauxlib.h lua.hpp
TO_LIB= liblua.a

These are the header files and the static library you need.

Create a folder for your project. Within it, create an empty source file named main.cpp, an empty Makefile, and two empty...