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Top 23 C++ Lua Projects
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Cocos2d
Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.
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InfluxDB
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annoy
Approximate Nearest Neighbors in C++/Python optimized for memory usage and loading/saving to disk
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Minetest
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open source voxel game-creation platform with easy modding and game creation
Project mention: The psychology behind why children are hooked on Minecraft | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-04Yes, and it isn't for every player. Funny story time: I bring online sometime a Luanti [1] server to playtest the game I made in a multiplayer context. One time someone joined and after a few minutes visiting, they asked "So, what is the goal?". I wasn't expecting that. MC may be popular, but one doesn't join a Luanti game server by accident, and most of them are MC- or at least MMORPG-like.
Still, although there's no set goals like in other games, this style of game has to have "affordances" for goals. Even the building activity in MC is not "free", as monsters are there to get in the way of the players' projects.
I also think that the social aspect is crucial, in the sense that having fun building things doesn't last, because one eventually runs out of ideas. Showing to others what you have achieved is an important part of it. Does art exist without an audience ? [2]
I think it is interesting to note that the fact that MC's world is fully editable by players is what drove the choice for the voxel technology, which was the only one allowing it with a normal PC at the time.
[1] https://www.luanti.org/
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Project mention: Free high-performance cross-platform game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-18
How does it compare to Löve 2D, other than shipping with a IDE? Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles usually come with very non-open dependencies.
https://love2d.org/
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Project mention: Wicked Engine replaced Bullet with Jolt physics, immediate performance gains | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-06-24
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Project mention: Pumpkin: A Modern Minecraft server written in Rust | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-10-15
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defold
Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games.
Project mention: Free high-performance cross-platform game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-18 -
Project mention: Robotics and ROS2 Course by University of Eastern Finland | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-19
One of my pet peeves with the algorithm/science ecosystem surrounding ros is that almost all of these algorithms are not usable without ROS. Deep down inside some planning algorithm, you find ros data structures, ros publishers etc. This is poorly designed code. It's like letting raw SQL queries infect an entire ecosystem of libraries. IMO, this pattern is holding robotics back.
Two examples come to mind of packages that do NOT do this:
1. plotjuggler [1], which is a tool for plotting time serious data. It can connect to ROS, but also supports many other communication paradigms, like mqtt, zeroMQ, websockets, custom data and some more I forget.
2. nvblox, which at its core doesn't depend on ROS but instead provides a ros2 compatibility layer.
[1] https://github.com/facontidavide/PlotJuggler
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sol2
Sol3 (sol2 v3.0) - a C++ <-> Lua API wrapper with advanced features and top notch performance - is here, and it's great! Documentation:
PSA: if you are using (modern) C++, https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 makes embedding Lua incredibly easy and straightforward.
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Luau (developed by Roblox) is a fork of Lua 5.1 with some very significant improvements to speed and QoL. It also alleviates the nil-terminated array problem.
https://github.com/luau-lang/luau
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Spring RTS game engine
A powerful free cross-platform RTS game engine. - Report issues at https://springrts.com/mantis/ (by spring)
In the Spring/Recoil RTS game engine[1] we adapted Lua to have deterministic execution allowing synchronous multiplayer simulation. In addition we relatively easily implemented a precise[2] serialization of the Lua VM, allowing us to support save/load for games with no code required from their side.
In other languages these would require much more effort.
[1] https://github.com/spring/spring or https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring (yay for forks!)
[2] Preserving the order of iteration on items in a hash table.
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Project mention: Antirez/load81: SDL based Lua programming environment for kids similar to Codea | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-10-26
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widelands
Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.
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RE-UE4SS
Injectable LUA scripting system, SDK generator, live property editor and other dumping utilities for UE4/5 games
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Project mention: Show HN: ImPlot3D – A 3D Plotting Library for Dear ImGui | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-18
I use this in a project, but it's more like a source code editor:
https://github.com/BalazsJako/ImGuiColorTextEdit
'Rich' text editing might hit limitations with Dear ImGui's text rendering (e.g. not sure if things like italics, bold or strikethrough are supported out of the box).
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mtasa-blue
Multi Theft Auto is a game engine that incorporates an extendable network play element into a proprietary commercial single-player game.
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Lua discussion
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Pallene: A statically compiled companion language for Lua
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
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Index
What are some of the best open-source Lua projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cocos2d | 18,517 |
| 2 | annoy | 13,740 |
| 3 | Minetest | 11,422 |
| 4 | conky | 7,669 |
| 5 | love | 6,558 |
| 6 | WickedEngine | 6,238 |
| 7 | cuberite | 5,173 |
| 8 | defold | 5,057 |
| 9 | PlotJuggler | 4,791 |
| 10 | sol2 | 4,511 |
| 11 | luau | 4,443 |
| 12 | REFramework | 3,745 |
| 13 | Spring RTS game engine | 3,670 |
| 14 | corona | 2,635 |
| 15 | wxFormBuilder | 2,218 |
| 16 | widelands | 2,087 |
| 17 | stepmania | 1,919 |
| 18 | FarManager | 1,915 |
| 19 | RE-UE4SS | 1,743 |
| 20 | ImGuiColorTextEdit | 1,534 |
| 21 | mtasa-blue | 1,506 |
| 22 | Panda3DS | 1,248 |
| 23 | nCine | 1,158 |
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