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

How to register C++ modules

In this section, we will export a C++ class instance to Lua. You probably have used or even implemented Lua modules before, the ones that the Lua interpreter can find and load automatically and return via Lua’s require function. Here, the focus is integrating Lua into C++, and in such use cases, things are initiated from a C++ executor to benefit from the rest of your C++ application. So, there is a difference if you have used standalone Lua modules before.

In the previous chapter, we implemented a Lua class called Destinations to keep track of places we want to go. Let us reimplement it in C++ so that we can export it to Lua.

Implementing a C++ class

Create two source files, Destinations.h and Destinations.cc. Remember to add Destinations.cc to the Makefile. Write the header file as follows:

#ifndef _DESTINATIONS_H
#define _DESTINATIONS_H
#include <map>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
class Destinations
{
public...