Lua
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sol2
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Lua
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Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.
sol2
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Tools for rolling your own engine
Here is link number 2 - Previous text "Sol"
Sol for fast lua embedding
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Storing pointers to C++ data in Lua in a type-safe-ish manner that are comparable on the Lua side.
Have you considered using sol2? https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 Or if you don't want to switch over, you can at least look at their code and see how they handle this.
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jluna: a new Julia <-> C++ Wrapper
It is half of a pun as I was inspired by [sol3](https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2) which is a lua c++ wrapper. Sol means sun and the julia c-api prefixes all it's functions with jl, luna means moon so it is pronounced "jay luna"
So far, it has been cumbersome to embed it into C-language projects, because it's C-interface is hard to use and poorly documented. Because of this, many choose to just use python or lua instead.
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A new C++ <-> Julia Wrapper: jluna
If you want to be portable I'd recommend C++ and Lua, I used those for years and it runs on everything and there's this most amazing wrapper API which was a huge inspiration
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Why the C Language Will Never Stop You from Making Mistakes
Off topic, but this is the author of my favourite Lua C++ binding library (https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2). Great guy!
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Sayonara, C++, and Hello to Rust
I mean, if you could tell from my original post, I like C++ templates. The point is not to constantly write templates in your calling code, the point is to architect a library with templates that affords flexibility and dynamism so that the calling code is easy to write, read, and reason about. Consider, for example, the sol2[0] example usage code vs the actual source code itself[1].
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Design Issues for Foreign Function Interfaces (2004)
Very interesting article!
Unfortunately, it doesn't mention Lua, which in my opinion has one of the most elegant C APIs that I have seen. It is entirely stack based, which means you only need to work with primitive types, such as numbers, C strings and user provided opaque pointers. As a consequence, you never have to care about memory management because Lua doesn't even let you access the actual Lua objects.
You want to create a table (= Lua's dictionary/array hybrid) and set a field "foo" to 5? lua_newtable() creates a new table and pushes it onto the stack. Then you push "foo" with lua_pushstring() and 5 with lua_pushnumber(). Finally you call lua_settable(), which pops the key and value from the stack, checks if the top of the stack contains a table, and if yes, sets the given field to the given value. The actual table structure is never exposed!
This kind of stack manipulation might seem unusual and a bit unweildy, but what you get is safety. If you mess up the stack or perform illegal operations, Lua will call an error handler, but the VM should never crash. The stack API can be seen as the fundamental layer upon which people can create nice abstractions for their host language of choice. Examples are "sol2" for C++ (https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2) or "lupa" for Python (https://github.com/scoder/lupa)
The public API is contained in "lua.h": https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/lua.h. "lauxlib.h" offers some useful helper functions: https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/lauxlib.h
For comparison, this is Python's "Limited" C API: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html#stable
If you want to learn more about Lua's C API, have a look at section 4 in https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html
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Hardcore metaprogramming in the wild
Next to some already said examples: sol2 v3.0 https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 - a Lua to C++ "header only" bridge...
What are some alternatives?
ChaiScript - Embedded Scripting Language Designed for C++
Duktape - Duktape - embeddable Javascript engine with a focus on portability and compact footprint
Wren - The Wren Programming Language. Wren is a small, fast, class-based concurrent scripting language.
V8 - The official mirror of the V8 Git repository
SWIG - SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages.
pybind11 - Seamless operability between C++11 and Python
luacxx - C++11 API for creating Lua bindings
Cython - The most widely used Python to C compiler
ChakraCore - ChakraCore is an open source Javascript engine with a C API. [Moved to: https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore]