Python Bindings Overview. Before you dive into how to call C from Python, it’s good to spend some time on why.There are several situations where creating Python bindings to call a C library is a great idea: You already have a large, tested, stable library written in C that you’d like to take advantage of in Python. This may be a communication library or a library to talk to a specific. The call woof(20) generates a unsafefunctionresult, which is then implicitly converted to an double after being called. The intermediate temporary functionresult is then destructed, popping the Lua function call results off the Lua stack. Lua-sh: calling shell commands as functions. Lua is one of my favourite languages. It’s tiny, it’s fast, it has simple grammar and is very easy to learn. I also often write shell scripts - from simple one-liners, to bigger ones containing business logic and binding together smaller app components.

This is Part 2 of my Integrating Lua into C++ Tutorial series.

For this part of the tutorial series, we will be discussing on how to interact with classes and objects, both in Lua and C++.

Using a C++ class in Lua

First off, let’s bind a simple C++ class so that we can use the class in our lua code. You can name your class anything, but I’m going to use something simple, ‘CppObject’.

Create a class with the following interface and implementation:

CppObject.hpp

This is a simple c++ class with a function that prints out “Test1Function1 Called!” when called.

This code helps to bind the C++ object into a Lua object with the alias ‘CppObject.

Lets dissect the code line by line.

state.new_usertype<CppObject>('CppObject', 'TestFunction1', &CppObject::TestFunction1);

This line defines the new Lua Usertype and also defines the member function ‘TestFunction1’ to specify that the class contains this function.

state.do_string('cppObj = CppObject:new() cppObj:TestFunction1()');

In this line, we create a new object ‘cppObj’ of type ‘CppObject’ and invoked it’s member function.

If all goes well, you should printed:

TestFunction1 Called!

Congratulations! You now know how to play around with C++ Objects in your lua code. If you are really interested in learning more about this, The tutorials over in the Sol2 github page really covers this extensively.

Using a Lua class in Lua

Before we go over using a Lua class in C++, let’s first do it in Lua.

The Lua language does not have any implementation of classes but they do have something called metatable that allows you to do really cool stuffs. One of them is to implement a class system. For this, we will be using a library called middleclass. Middleclass is an OOP library that I really like to use. It’s very lightweight, and easy to use.

I will only be covering the basics, so head over to their github page for more info.

For starters, download the middleclass file and then add it into your scripts folder. I’ll show you how to set it up later.

For now, go to your scripts folder and create a new lua file with the following code:

TestClass.lua

The code above defines the class that we will be using, ‘TestClass’.

The initialize function will be called whenever a TestClass object is created. You can say that it’s the constructor of the class.

state['package']['path'] = (package_path + ';scripts/middleclass.lua').c_str();

Here, I initialized the middleclass library by adding it into the luastate”s package path.

state.do_file('scripts/TestClass.lua');

I then ran the ‘TestClass.lua’ file that defines my TestClass Lua class.

state.do_string('testObj = TestClass:new() testObj.TestFunctionCall()');

I then created a TestClass object and called it’s member function ‘TestFunctionCall’

If everything went well, you should be printing this on the console:

TestClass Created!
TestClass TestFunction Called!

This is just a basic functionality for using MiddleClass together with Sol2. I hope you find it useful.

Using a Lua class in C++

Now we get to the more interesting part of the tutorial, using a lua object in c++. I find that the best way for this is to create a wrapper class.

You actually do not need to create a wrapper class like ScriptObject as you can just save it into a sol::table but I would recommend making one to make your life easier.

ScriptObject.hpp

Whew this is rather long. This class omits out quite a few functions for it to be usable, but it contains the bare-bones of what we need for the tutorial. I wanted to keep it simple. Don’t worry though, I’ll share the full class implementation later.

This is the non-default constructor of the ScriptObject.

This function creates a Lua object of type ‘luaClassName’ and gives them a unique name for use in the luaState. The name is then saved in m_scriptVarName.

m_luaObjectData = (*m_pLuaState)[m_scriptVarName];

If you remember the previous tutorial, then this should be rather familiar. Here, we save the lua object into m_luaObjectData for easy access.

m_pLuaState->script(luaScript, [&isValidCreation](lua_State* state, sol::protected_function_result res) { isValidCreation = false; return res; });

The most complex part about this function would most probably be in this line. I created this lambda function to suppress an exception being thrown if the lua code called is not valid. In this case, it would usually be called if the Lua-class of the object you are trying to create is not valid.

If an exception is thrown, we will set isValidCreation to false, and then stop with the creation of the object.

If m_initialized boolean is set to true at the end of the function, it would mean that your object is successfully created.

This helper function helps us call the lua object’s member functions.

In the destructor, we set the object to nil and then let the garbage collection do all the work.

Alright, so we have already defined our ScriptObject wrapper class. So now let’s try using it.

So here we create our ScriptObject object and then call the “TestFunctionCall” function. The behaviour is totally the same as the previous example.

If everything went well, same as before, you should be printing this on the console:

TestClass Created!
TestClass TestFunction Called!

Summary

This part of the tutorial is where you start having the basic knowledge on OOP on Lua, as well as handling classes in both Lua and C++ codes.

Codes

CppObject.hpp

ScriptObject.hpp

ScriptObject.cpp

Main.cpp

Previous (Part 1b: The Basics) | Next(Part 2.5: Adding Templates to ScriptObject Class)

Product & Tech

Introduction

The Roblox engine is written in a combination of C++ and Lua, with the code that performs computationally intensive operations written in optimized C++, while game logic and scripts are written in Lua, for ease of development. For this model to be effective, it requires that the transitions between Lua and C++ be as fast as possible, as any time spent in this no man’s land is essentially just wasted milliseconds.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been rolling out various improvements to this part of the system. One part specifically—the actual invocation of C++ methods from Lua—was particularly interesting, as it led to considerable speed improvements and required digging around in the guts of Lua to understand how things worked under the hood.

We ended up modifying the Lua VM itself, but before we get to that, we need to lay some groundwork.

Compilers, VM, and bytecode

When Lua source code is compiled, it’s compiled into Lua bytecode, which the Lua VM then runs. Lua bytecode has around 35 instructions in total, for things like reading/writing tables, calling functions, performing binary operations, jumps and conditionals, and so on. The Lua VM is register-based, as opposed to being stack-based like many other VMs, so part of what the compiler does when it generates bytecode is determine which registers each instruction should use.

Each instruction has the form “OP_CODE A B,” or “OP_CODE A B C,” where “OP_CODE” is the opcode (for example, CALL f

Calling C++ Function From Lua Is Slow