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

Part 3 – Calling C++ from Lua

With your knowledge of calling Lua from C++, in this part, you will continue to learn how to call C++ from Lua.

You will start by learning how to implement and export a C++ function that can be called from Lua scripts. Then, the complexity will increase step by step. You will export a C++ class as a Lua module and improve the process of how it is exported. Finally, you will have a general module exporter that can help you to export any C++ class to Lua.

This part comprises the following chapters:

  • Chapter 6, How to Call C++ from Lua
  • Chapter 7, Working with C++ Types
  • Chapter 8, Abstracting a C++ Type Exporter