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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

Working with Lua table entries

A table entry is the key-value pair for a table element. Lua table keys can be of many data types – for example, of function type. For practical reasons, especially when integrating with C++, we only consider string keys and integer keys.

In script.lua, add a simple table as follows:

position = { x = 0, y = 0 }

position is indexed by strings. We will learn how to read from and write to it in C++.

Getting a table entry value

Up until now, in C++ code, we have only used one piece of information to locate a value in Lua. Consider how we implemented LuaExecutor::getGlobal and LuaExecutor::call. To locate a global variable or to call a function, we pass the name of the variable or the function to a Lua library method.

To work with a table entry, we would need two pieces of information – the table and the table entry key. First, we need to locate the table; after that, we can use the entry key to work on the entry value.

The...

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