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

Other toolchain options

If you do not have access to a native POSIX system, there are many other toolchain options. Here we have given two examples. Because your development platform may be different and OS updates and situations change, these only serve as some ideas. You can always research online and experiment to get a comfortable setup for yourself.

Using Visual Studio or Xcode

The Lua source code is written in C and does not need other dependencies. You can copy the src folder from the Lua source code package into Visual Studio or Xcode, either into your project directly or by configuring it as a Lua project that your main project depends on. Tweak the project settings as you need. This is quite doable.

Whatever IDE you choose to use, remember to check its license to see whether you can use the IDE for your purpose.

Using Cygwin

If you use Windows, you can get Cygwin for a POSIX experience:

  1. Download the Cygwin installer from https://sourceware.org/cygwin...