Embedding | Lua by Example

Lua complements other languages very well. It is a language as dynamic as Python, but LuaJIT compiles it to very fast machine code, sometimes faster than many statically compiled languages for computational code. The language runtime is very small and carefully designed for embedding (some libraries provide complete Lua VM implementations).

Go

You can use either yuin/gopher-lua or Shopify/go-lua .

// main.go
package main

import "github.com/Shopify/go-lua"

func main() {
    l := lua.NewState()
    lua.OpenLibraries(l)
    if err := lua.DoString(l, `print("Hi!")`); err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}

$ go run main.go
Hi!

Python

One can use lupa package.

>>> import lupa
>>> from lupa import LuaRuntime
>>> lua = LuaRuntime(unpack_returned_tuples=True)

>>> lua.eval('1+1')
2

>>> lua_func = lua.eval('function(f, n) return f(n) end')

>>> def py_add1(n): return n+1
>>> lua_func(py_add1, 2)
3

>>> lua.eval('python.eval(" 2 ** 2 ")') == 4
True
>>> lua.eval('python.builtins.str(4)') == '4'
True

Rust

Example uses rlua - high level Lua bindings to Rust.

use std::f32;
use std::iter::FromIterator;

use rlua::{Lua};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let lua = Lua::new();

    lua.context(|lua_ctx| {
        let globals = lua_ctx.globals();

        globals.set("string_var", "hello")?;
        globals.set("int_var", 42)?;

        lua_ctx.load(
            r#"
            print(string_var)
            "#,
        )
        .exec()?;

        Ok(())
    })?;
}

.NET

One can use NLua as a bridge between Lua and the .NET.