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

Executing a Lua file

In Chapter 1, we used the Lua library to load a file and run the script. We will do the same here but in a more proper C++ way. In LuaExecutor.h, add the following new code:

#include <string>
class LuaExecutor
{
public:
    void executeFile(const std::string &path);
private:
    void pcall(int nargs = 0, int nresults = 0);
    std::string popString();
};

You can of course make all those member functions const, for example, std::string popString() const, because in LuaExecutor we only keep the Lua state L transparently and do not change its value. Here, we are omitting it to prevent too many line breaks in code listings.

executeFile is our public function and the other two are internal helper functions. In LuaExecutor.cc, let us implement executeFile first:

#include <iostream>
void LuaExecutor::executeFile(const std::string &path)
{
    if (luaL_loadfile...