Basic usage

To use luabind, you must include lua.h and luabind’s main header file:

extern "C"
{
    #include "lua.h"
}

#include <luabind/luabind.hpp>

This includes support for both registering classes and functions. If you just want to have support for functions or classes you can include luabind/function.hpp and luabind/class.hpp separately:

#include <luabind/function.hpp>
#include <luabind/class.hpp>

The first thing you need to do is to call luabind::open(lua_State*) which will register the functions to create classes from Lua, and initialize some state-global structures used by luabind. If you don’t call this function you will hit asserts later in the library. There is no corresponding close function because once a class has been registered in Lua, there really isn’t any good way to remove it. Partly because any remaining instances of that class relies on the class being there. Everything will be cleaned up when the state is closed though.

Luabind’s headers will never include lua.h directly, but through <luabind/lua_include.hpp>. If you for some reason need to include another Lua header, you can modify this file.

Hello world

#include <iostream>
#include <luabind/luabind.hpp>

void greet()
{
    std::cout << "hello world!\n";
}

extern "C" int init(lua_State* L)
{
    using namespace luabind;

    open(L);

    module(L)
    [
        def("greet", &greet)
    ];

    return 0;
}

Lua 5.0  Copyright (C) 1994-2003 Tecgraf, PUC-Rio
> loadlib('hello_world.dll', 'init')()
> greet()
Hello world!
>