Build options

There are a number of configuration options (preprocessor #defines available when building luabind. It is very important that your project has the exact same configuration options as the ones given when the library was build! The exceptions are the LUABIND_MAX_ARITY and LUABIND_MAX_BASES which are template-based options and only matters when you use the library (which means they can differ from the settings of the library). To achieve this you should use the CMake equivalent of these options. Then, when building with CMake the build_information.hpp header is created and automatically included by config.hpp, thus keeping the options in sync automatically.

LUABIND_MAX_ARITY

Controls the maximum arity of functions that are registered with luabind. You can’t register functions that takes more parameters than the number this macro is set to. It defaults to 5, so, if your functions have greater arity you have to redefine it. A high limit will increase compilation time.

LUABIND_MAX_BASES

Controls the maximum number of classes one class can derive from in luabind (the number of classes specified within bases<>). LUABIND_MAX_BASES defaults to 4. A high limit will increase compilation time.

LUABIND_NO_ERROR_CHECKING

If this macro is defined, all the Lua code is expected only to make legal calls. If illegal function calls are made (e.g. giving parameters that doesn’t match the function signature) they will not be detected by luabind and the application will probably crash. Error checking could be disabled when shipping a release build (given that no end-user has access to write custom Lua code). Note that function parameter matching will be done if a function is overloaded, since otherwise it’s impossible to know which one was called. Functions will still be able to throw exceptions when error checking is disabled.

If a function throws an exception it will be caught by luabind and propagated with lua_error().

LUABIND_NO_EXCEPTIONS

This define will disable all usage of try, catch and throw in luabind. This will in many cases disable run-time errors, when performing invalid casts or calling Lua functions that fails or returns values that cannot be converted by the given policy. luabind requires that no function called directly or indirectly by luabind throws an exception (throwing exceptions through Lua has undefined behavior).

Where exceptions are the only way to get an error report from luabind, they will be replaced with calls to the callback functions set with set_error_callback() and set_cast_failed_callback().

LUA_API

If you want to link dynamically against Lua, you can set this define to the import-keyword on your compiler and platform. On Windows in Visual Studio this should be __declspec(dllimport) if you want to link against Lua as a dll.

LUABIND_DYNAMIC_LINK

Must be defined if you intend to link against the luabind shared library (.so or DLL) / build it as such. Note that in future versions of luabind, this option may be dependent on BUILD_SHARED_LIBS in CMake, so you should always set both CMake options to the same value.

If enabling this, you should link Lua dynamically to both Luabind and your application. If you encounter double-free errors or other memory corruption, this might be the problem.

LUABIND_CPLUSPLUS_LUA

Without this, all included Lua headers will be wrapped in extern "C". Define this if you compiled Lua as C++.

NDEBUG

This define will disable all asserts and should be defined in a release build.

LUABIND_USE_NOEXCEPT

If you use Boost <= 1.46 but your compiler is C++11 compliant and marks destructors as noexcept by default, you need to define LUABIND_USE_NOEXCEPT. Failing to do so will cause std::terminate() being called if a destructor throws (e.g. the destructor of the proxy returned by call_function or object::operator()).

CMake options

The following options can be given to CMake when building luabind. You can either specify them directly on the commandline using -Doption=value or let CMake ask you for each of them by invoking it with the -i flag. On Windows, you will usually prefer cmake-gui.

All options are booleans, unless specified otherwise.

LUABIND_ENABLE_WARNINGS

Enable compiler warnings during the build of luabind and the tests.

LUABIND_USE_CXX11

This controls whether the -std=c++11 flag is passed to compilers that support it. And whether support for C++11 scoped enums can be enabled.

BUILD_TESTING

Whether to generate build files for the unit tests (they must be run manually in any case).

LUABIND_BUILD_HEADER_TESTS

Enable this for (many) additional compilation tests: Each of Luabind’s public headers will be included in a generated .cpp file which otherwise only contains an empty main function, meaning that one dummy binary per header file is generated.

This can only be enabled if BUILD_TESTING is enabled.

LUABIND_APPEND_VERSION_SUFFIX

With this option set (the default), built binaries and object archives will be named e.g. luabind09.dll instead of just luabind.dll.

LUABIND_LUA_VERSION

A string variable with defaults to "" (the empty string). It can be set to "51" or "52" to use the respective Lua versions. If left empty, Lua52 will be tried first before falling back to Lua51.

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE

String option. See the corresponding entry in the CMake manual.