writing and building a lua c extension module
[Update: 2009-04-09]
This package is now on luarocks under it's new name: "stringy". It now includes startswith and endswith methods (more coming). Under advice of lua gurus, I no longer add to the string base methods. And finally, it's available in my lua github repo.
[/Update]
I've been messing with Lua programming language lately, mostly because I wanted to try to use love2d as a visualization tool. I got side-tracked into building a c extension for lua. The C-API is much different from python.
In lua, all the c functions have a signature like:
And then to return values, you just push them back onto the stack. I don't grok this fully yet, but it seems to handle all the memory allocation for you.
Anyway, it's hard to find a full example of creating a C extension for lua 5.1. It actually seems more common just to provide patches for the lua distribution itself. There are some docs but they were difficult for me to find and it's not clear which docs are for lua-5.1--the current version. So I'm including a full example with sourcecode, simple tests, Makefile, and luarock spec.
The full gist is here.
The C code (shamelessly stolen from the wiki and book -- not my own code) actually implements 2 very useful functions string.split and string.strip. These are otherwise easily added using lua's regular expression searches, but these are faster as they're not using the regexp machinery:
Note the functions are included in a struct and "registered" with the luaopen_stringext function.
The Makefile then builds the shared library: The shared library stringext.so is then immediately usable from the lua interpreter. A test session looks like:. Where string.split() returns a table (array) of the tokens. Another cool thing about lua is visible in that script. The added functions actually become methods on Lua strings! So after importing stringext, all strings now have strip() and split() methods! This is because of the line in stringext.c:
Finally, luarocks... Luarocks are the equivalent of python eggs or ruby gems (you gotta love all these clever names). They take a rockspec file (equiv of python's setup.{py,cfg}). Mine looks like this.
I've requested that be added to the main luarocks repository, there doesnt seem to be a way to upload your own rock directly. Still once you write the rockspec, you can build the C extension without a Makefile by typing
Anyone interested can download a tar-ball of the entire distribution here.
I add that the lua community seems very active and helpful. I asked a question about building the extension and received quick, helpful replies.
This package is now on luarocks under it's new name: "stringy". It now includes startswith and endswith methods (more coming). Under advice of lua gurus, I no longer add to the string base methods. And finally, it's available in my lua github repo.
[/Update]
I've been messing with Lua programming language lately, mostly because I wanted to try to use love2d as a visualization tool. I got side-tracked into building a c extension for lua. The C-API is much different from python.
In lua, all the c functions have a signature like:
int c_function(lua_State *L)and you use the lua c API to pull values off the lua_state stack thingy -- L.
And then to return values, you just push them back onto the stack. I don't grok this fully yet, but it seems to handle all the memory allocation for you.
Anyway, it's hard to find a full example of creating a C extension for lua 5.1. It actually seems more common just to provide patches for the lua distribution itself. There are some docs but they were difficult for me to find and it's not clear which docs are for lua-5.1--the current version. So I'm including a full example with sourcecode, simple tests, Makefile, and luarock spec.
The full gist is here.
The C code (shamelessly stolen from the wiki and book -- not my own code) actually implements 2 very useful functions string.split and string.strip. These are otherwise easily added using lua's regular expression searches, but these are faster as they're not using the regexp machinery:
Note the functions are included in a struct and "registered" with the luaopen_stringext function.
The Makefile then builds the shared library: The shared library stringext.so is then immediately usable from the lua interpreter. A test session looks like:. Where string.split() returns a table (array) of the tokens. Another cool thing about lua is visible in that script. The added functions actually become methods on Lua strings! So after importing stringext, all strings now have strip() and split() methods! This is because of the line in stringext.c:
luaL_openlib(L, "string", stringext, 0);which tells it to add the methods to the "string" module.
Finally, luarocks... Luarocks are the equivalent of python eggs or ruby gems (you gotta love all these clever names). They take a rockspec file (equiv of python's setup.{py,cfg}). Mine looks like this.
I've requested that be added to the main luarocks repository, there doesnt seem to be a way to upload your own rock directly. Still once you write the rockspec, you can build the C extension without a Makefile by typing
luarocks makeand it handles all the appropriate flags and such.
Anyone interested can download a tar-ball of the entire distribution here.
I add that the lua community seems very active and helpful. I asked a question about building the extension and received quick, helpful replies.
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