Scopes

Everything that gets registered in Lua is registered in a given Lua table, in a namespace (Lua table at given name), or in the global scope (called module). All registrations must be surrounded by its scope. To define a module, the luabind::module class is used. It is used like this:

module(L)
[
    // declarations
];

This will register all declared functions or classes in the global namespace in Lua.

You can also register into a custom Lua table wrapped in a Object:

object mod = newtable(L);
module(L, mod)
[
    // declarations
];

You can then directly use all object manipulation functions on mod.

If you just want to have a namespace for your module (like the standard libraries) you can give a name to the constructor, like this:

module(L, "my_library")
[
    // declarations
];

Here all declarations will be put in the my_library table.

If you want nested namespace’s you can use the luabind::namespace_ class. It works exactly as luabind::module except that it doesn’t take a lua_State* in it’s constructor. An example of its usage could look like this:

module(L, "my_library")
[
    // declarations

    namespace_("detail")
    [
        // library-private declarations
    ]
];

As you might have figured out, the following declarations are equivalent:

module(L)
[
    namespace_("my_library")
    [
        // declarations
    ]

];

module(L, "my_library")
[
    // declarations
];

Each declaration must be separated by a comma, like this:

module(L)
[
    def("f", &f),
    def("g", &g),
    class_<A>("A")
        .def(constructor<int, int>),
    def("h", &h)
];

More about the actual declarations in the Binding functions to Lua and Binding classes to Lua sections.