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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 functions

The Lua hello function we used in the previous section is a good example to demonstrate global variables, but it is not how you would usually implement such a feature. Now consider a more suitable implementation:

function greetings(whom)
    return "Hello " .. whom
end

This Lua greetings function expects whom as a function parameter and returns the greeting string instead of printing it out. You can use the greeting string in more flexible ways, for example, by using it on a GUI window.

Earlier in this chapter, while learning how to execute Lua scripts, we implemented the execute function in our executor. We can invoke greetings with it:

LuaExecutor lua;
lua.executeFile("script.lua");
lua.execute("greetings('Lua')");

But this is not C++ calling a Lua function; it is a Lua script calling a Lua function. C++ just compiles the Lua script and has no access to the function’s return value...

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