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Lua Quick Start Guide

You're reading from   Lua Quick Start Guide The easiest way to learn Lua programming

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789343229
Length 202 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Gabor Szauer Gabor Szauer
Author Profile Icon Gabor Szauer
Gabor Szauer
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Toc

Calling C functions from Lua

Because functions in C and Lua work so differently, exposing a C function to Lua can get a bit tricky. All C functions that Lua can call must follow the signature of lua_CFunction, which is defined in lua.h as the following:

typedef int (*lua_CFunction) (lua_State *L);

This function takes only one argument, the lua_State. The return value of the function is an integer. This integer is the number of elements that the function pushed onto the stack as return values.

Lua has multiple stacks—each C function called from Lua has its own stack and does not share the global stack.

Let's take for example a simple C function that returns the magnitude of a three-dimensional vector. In C, the code for doing so might look something like the following:

double Vec3Magnitude(double x, double y, double z) {
double dot = x * x + y * y + z * z;
if...
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