Re: creating inheritance with the lua API

["Littlefield, Tyler" <tyler@...>]

Hello:
On 8/3/2014 7:23 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
> 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?

If there are other solutions, I'd appreciate them; My solution was more out of what made sense for me than the "right" way to do anything. I have game objects (player, Entity, etc) that need to be wrapped so that they can be accessed through scripting. Rather than providing functional bindings (entity.GetName, entity.setName) etc, I decided to just wrap up individual classes. This gives me more flexability: I don't have to add all of the GetName and SetName to other objects that might inherit Entity, for example. My goal was to figure out exactly how to do this OO-like in C, then write Lua scripts to generate all of the code for me.

 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.



--
Take care,
Ty
http://tds-solutions.net
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.