Re: creating inheritance with the lua API

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Littlefield, Tyler once stated:
> 
> Hello:
> I've followed the lua OO tutorials and have kind of gotten it working. My 
> issues seem to come in when trying to translate this to c, however. I'm not 
> sure why it's such a hard problem for me. I'm mainly looking for examples 
> of how to do this in c-side API, as there are tons of lua OO ideas floating 
> around out there.

  Why do you need to do it with the C API?  

  At work, I had implemented a Lua wrapper for one of our proprietary protocols
using the C API.  A recent extention (backwards comptable as both servers
and clients are set to ignore anything they don't understand) to the
protocol was added.  On a lark, I decided to change gears and write as much
of the protocol handler in Lua [1].

  The C API weighed in at 2,800 lines of C code (including comments and
blank lines---it's a rough count).  The new almost-exclusively Lua API
weights in at 828 lines (again, comments, blank lines, etc.).  Of that, 642
are in Lua and 186 in C (some data conversion routines [2] that are just
plain easier to do in C).

  -spc 

[1]	The rewrite also makes it easier to test old clients/servers vs. new
	clients/servers.

[2]	Although the new Lua 5.3 string.dumpint() and string.undumpint()
	routines would cut that C code right down.