RE: LuaPlus

["Joshua Jensen" <jjensen@...>]

I'm not sure what font you're using, but shown in Outlook, it's atrocious.

> In the newsgroup archives I found mention of LuaPlus 
> (http://wwhiz.com/LuaPlus), an extension to Lua for C++ with 
> addin support for Visual Studio's debugger and a whole lot more.
> 
> Anyone else using this?  it looked rather good, especially 
> the Lua core
> enhancements: integral support for wide strings and 
> metatables for integral types too.

Microsoft shipped Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding
(http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2001-08/msg00068.html) using a LuaPlus
version written for Lua 4.1 Alpha.  Sometime in the next six months, I am
aware of 5 game titles that will be shipping using LuaPlus.  I am also aware
of several other games whose ship dates I don't know using LuaPlus.  In
addition, there are quite a few other companies who have been in contact
with me with questions/feature requests.

So in answer to your question, yes, there are quite a few people using it.

> A lot of the C++ wrappers made sense too.

Yep.  LuaObject and LuaTableIterator are my favorites.  LuaObject doesn't
require any form of stack manipulation, and that goes a long way toward
making the C++ interface to Lua much cleaner.

> I didn't see mention of it on lua-users.org, or maybe it was 
> in too obscure a place to find.

I don't think it was there, although a past C++ wrapper I wrote, LuaState,
was.  I decided I wasn't going to make the Lua mailing list or other
Lua-core-specific sites my personal advertising spot.  Normally, I take
LuaPlus conversations offline if they ever show up on list.  Since your
question was asked to the Lua community, I am responding to the Lua
community.

> Martin says:
> I was looking at LuaPlus but gave up on the facts that it was specifically
Win32 only...

It may look that way, but it isn't entirely true.  There is one individual I
am aware of using LuaPlus on Linux.  Sure, he doesn't have access to the
Remote Lua Debugger or the various VS.NET Lua add-ins, but that's only part
of the package.  Your statement just reminded me that this individual was
going to send me the patches to LuaPlus to get it compiling on Linux, and I
never followed up on it.

The biggest Linux issues we ran into were #pragma once not existing in
headers and wchar_t actually being 4 bytes instead of 2.

> There is also "Sol" which LuaPlus (and LuaState) seem to take ideas from.
> It also appears that most of Sol's "improvements" were inherited for Lua
> version 5.

Yep.  Edgar and I used to have conversations about Lua features.  I always
gave him credit for what was his.  My biggest issue with Sol was it was a
huge rework of the Lua core.  LuaPlus just patches the core when a feature
is needed.  Sol renamed EVERYTHING.

> John says:
> As far as C++ wrappers, I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet,
> but have you looked at luabind (http://luabind.sourceforge.net/)?

LuaBind and LuaPlus fill two different niches.  LuaPlus isn't interested in
duplicating features like cross language inheritance.  The LuaBind team did
an EXCELLENT job at implementing features like that.  My biggest issue with
LuaPlus is its reliance on Boost.  You can't really pick and choose a few
features of Boost.  You take it all or you take nothing.  I'm not in a
position to inherit the entire library (and its subsequent reliance on STL).

> John says:
> LuaBind: Personally I wonder about the efficiency of it all
> if used extensively...

Interestingly enough, under VC7 without all the special overloading stuff
LuaBind takes care of, the generated assembly code is basically as efficient
as if you had called all the lua_*() APIs by hand.  (It is in LuaPlus,
anyway.)

> I'll check out luabind, at first glance it seems better supported
> than LuaPlus.

Depends on what you mean by "better supported..."  :)

-Josh