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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

Supporting a variable number of arguments

The Lua function supports a variable number of arguments. Let us implement one in script.lua:

function greetings(...)
    local result = "Hello"
    for i, v in ipairs{...} do
        result = result .. " " .. v .. ","
    end
    return result
end

This will return a greeting message and include all arguments in the message. The three dots (...) indicate that the function takes a variable number of arguments. We can iterate through the arguments with ipairs.

How can we support this in C++? For the stack operations, we only need to push more values. The main decision is how we should declare the Lua executor call function to accept a variable number of arguments.

Implementing the C++ function

Since C++11, we can use a variadic function template to pass a parameter pack. A parameter...

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