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 Integrate Lua with C++

Integrate Lua with C++

By : Wenhuan Li
4.5 (2)
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 Integrate Lua with C++

Integrate Lua with C++

4.5 (2)
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)
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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 use the Lua registry

The Lua registry is a global table that can be accessed by all C/C++ code. It is one of the places that C++ code can keep state across different function calls. You cannot access this table in Lua code unless you use the Lua debug library. However, you should not use the debug library in production code; so, the registry is for C/C++ code only.

The registry versus upvalues

In the previous chapter, we learned about Lua upvalues. An upvalue keeps a state for a specific Lua C function across calls. The registry, on the other hand, can be accessed by all Lua C functions.

To export C++ types to Lua, we will use Lua userdata to represent the type and the registry so that we have a metatable for functions for the type. We will learn about the registry first, then the userdata, and finally put everything together to export C++ types to Lua.

Let’s add support for the registry in our Lua executor so that we know how to use it.

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