Creating Solid APIs with Lua

Learn how you can build APIs by integrating the Lua and C programming languages. These APIs can be used to speed up development within your company, allow people to customize your app or game, and serve as the foundation of a domain-specific language within a platform you’re developing.

Author Tyler Neylon—a game designer with a PhD in applied math—shows you how C and Lua interface with each other, so you can create a set of Lua classes and functions that work programmatically with local applications. You’ll also learn how to guard against shady scripts written by users who either make mistakes or purposefully attempt to break your system.

• Build Lua from source, then link the Lua library to a C program that can execute a Lua script
• Write Lua-visible functions with the power of C by calling C functions from Lua
• Work with Lua data types from C
• Add Lua classes to your API, implemented in either Lua or C
• Manage Lua exceptions with error-handling functions, and add custom hook functions that can protect you from common programming errors
• Give users the freedom to write their own scripts that can be run in a C-created sandboxed environment

Lua is easy to learn, especially if you know JavaScript. Neylon’s free 3-part series on oreilly.com, Learn Lua from JavaScript, will help you get started.