miqueas / lua-c-api-examples

Some C code I wrote while learning the Lua C API

Lua-C-API

A personal repo where I push things while I'm learning the Lua C API! Feel free to contribute :)

NOTE: I really think that the Lua C API and this examples can be highly self-explained, BUT I recommend you to always check the Reference Manual to see in detail how every thing works

Building

If you want to build this, you'll need Meson and Lua 5.1 development files and then:

meson . _BUILD
ninja -C _BUILD

And in the _BUILD folder you'll see the compiled files

Running tests

Just:

meson test -C _BUILD

References

I mainly readed the Official Reference Manual but I also saw this:

• Veinin/lua-c-api-tutorial – First steps
• Stack (Wikipedia) – The simple illustration with numbers was really helpful
• Understanding the lua stack – A set of articles I found about the stack
• tylerneylon/lua_api_demo – Here I learned how to use the lua_newuserdata function
• hertogp/lua-capi-examples – Stack dump example

And finally, thanks to the members of the Telegram Group!

Why Lua 5.1?

Yes ✔️

lua-c-api-examples's Issues

Make this project more portable

This is something I've been considering for a while. Since some linux distros doesn't have all versions of Lua in their repositories (see Fedora and openSUSE) or the user is on Windows, building this project can be a bit hard or may require to modify the meson.build files to work.

So, to solve this I have a couple of ideas:

• Create a Meson .wrap file and make Lua a dependency of this project
• Use minilua
• Something else (a custom solution)

I already tried the first one, but... It was more complicated than I expected so I never continued; plus, I never uploaded the changes made, but I'm still considering that option.

The 2nd options looks better tho, but it's only Lua 5.4, but the solution that proposes minilua is pretty smart (IMO) and very simple.

To be honest, I'll probably use the minilua solution, but custom: I'll take the gen.sh script from minilua to generate C headers for all major Lua versions.

Hopefully, I'll fix this soon. I'm gonna update this issue with a task list if I make some progress.

• Translate Lua 5.4 Makefile to Meson. Done, see #3
• Add support for Lua 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3
• Maybe test it a little and ensure it works?