Re: "Official" binding library

[Carsten Fuchs <carsten.fuchs@...>]

Hi Jose,

Am 2011-12-05 12:09, schrieb Jose Marin:
> Is there a "official" binding library/tool for Lua?
> I´ve used Lunar and tolua, what are you using?

Many other good answers have already been given to your question, but as our "PiL2-approach" 
seems to be somewhat in a minority, I'd like to mention it as well:
We just use the techniques described in the PiL2 book for binding to Lua, because they are 
simple, clear and lightweight.

More precisely, we have a GUI system, where a GUI is composed of a hierarchy of windows such as 
buttons, frames, listboxes, choices, etc. The different types of windows are modeled as a C++ 
class hierarchy, and each window instance is represented and accessible both in C++ and in Lua. 
Loosely spoken, the C++ code does the rendering and animation of the window instances, the Lua 
code does the scripting.

The only "extra" techniques beyond the PiL2 that we use are:

	- A simple "type system" that allows us to traverse the window class hierarchy in C++ code, 
which is very useful at initialization time for setting up all the C++ window classes with Lua: 
registering the C++-implemented Lua methods, setting up inheritance, etc. (Besides that, 
traversing the type system is also useful e.g. for auto-generating documentation, etc.)

	- Some considerations to make sure that window instances that still live in C++ but are not 
referenced in Lua are not accidentally garbage-collected by Lua. (This is explained in the PiL2 
as well, I just mention it because we made a special reference-counted "window pointer class" to 
implement it.)

If you want to see our code, have a look at 
<http://trac.cafu.de/browser/cafu/trunk/Libs/GuiSys>, starting with Window.hpp, and possibly 
<http://trac.cafu.de/browser/cafu/trunk/Libs/TypeSys.hpp>

Hope this helps!  :-)

Best regards,
Carsten



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