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 source code

Building your C++ project with the Lua source code has the benefit that it is always compiled as part of your project, and there is no possibility of any surprises arising from compiler incompatibilities.

The major difference from linking with a pre-compiled Lua library is that we will now compile the Lua library from its source code first. It is also better to use the source code package without modifying it or copying only a few selected files into a new folder hierarchy. This will help in the future if you need to use a newer Lua version. In such a case, all you will need to do is to replace the Lua source code folder with the new version.

Creating a project to work with the Lua source code

To create a project using the Lua source code, we need to go back to the Lua source code package:

lua-5.4.6 % ls
Makefile README doc src

You will need the src subfolder.

Create a folder for a new project. Within it, create an empty...