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

Working with Lua Tables

In this chapter, we will continue to improve our Lua executor to work with tables. Many of the mechanisms are extensions of the learnings from the previous chapter. You will also learn about object-oriented programming (OOP) in Lua and how to call Lua object methods. In all, Lua objects are Lua tables by nature.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Working with Lua table entries
  • Working with Lua arrays
  • OOP in Lua
  • Working with Lua table functions