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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

Calling Lua from C++

To call Lua code from C++, we can use lua_pcall, which is declared as follows:

int lua_pcall(
    lua_State *L, int nargs, int nresults, int msgh);

This will call a Lua callable, which can be a function or a chunk. You can push the Lua function to be called onto the stack, or compile a file or a string into a chunk and then place it onto the stack. nargs is the number of arguments for the callable. The arguments are pushed onto the stack above the callable. nresults is the count of return values the callable would return. Use LUA_MULTRET to indicate that you expect a variable count of return values. msgh is the stack index for an error message handler.

lua_pcall calls the callable in protected mode, which means that any error that may have occurred in the call chain is not propagated. Instead, an error status code is returned from lua_pcall.

In the LuaExecutor class that we have implemented, you can find many examples of calling...

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