Sol2 Alternatives

Reviews and mentions

• Sayonara, C++, and Hello to Rust
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2021

  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].

  0. https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2

• Design Issues for Foreign Function Interfaces (2004)
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2021

  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

• Hardcore metaprogramming in the wild
  17 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 26 Oct 2021

  Next to some already said examples: sol2 v3.0 https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 - a Lua to C++ "header only" bridge...

• Embedding Lisp in C++ – A Recipe
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2021
• My experience binding a couple of scripting engines with C++
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 May 2021

  Well, by this I mean "unfamiliar to me", of course. Lol.

  Actually Lua is something to consider from the point of view of usage: it is an industry standard actually. However, all those small quirks in semantics... and classes can be done in many ways (that is what I understand, via metatables)...

  In ChaiSCript or Wren there is one true way and you are done. You might like it or not, but it leads to less confusion, especially if you use most of the time what is in the mainstream.

  This is by no means a bad thing in itself, it is just about how ergonomic or time-consuming it could be for myself: I just feel more comfortable with ChaiScript, Wren or Squirrel than with Lua. Even AngelsCript is also more similar to what you already have. So when exposing APIs there is much less friction.

  Truth to be told, there is also https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 which looks great and something to consider. It makes binding things quite easier and gives you object-oriented Lua. You could rely on that.

  It was just my subjective choice. There is no 100% right choice. Probably, if I found people that are comfortable with Lua I would use that. But the case is that this is a project of mine as it stands now.

• Enabling C/C++ compilation in an application.
  4 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 1 May 2021

  3) Similiar to 2, but use more common scripting languages: chai, cs-script, sol2 (c++ framework to embed lua)

• Any articles/tutorials on how to implement C# scripting to a C++ engine?
  1 project | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 8 Mar 2021