Sol 2.17

Sol is a C++ library binding to Lua. It currently supports all Lua versions 5.1+ (LuaJIT 2.x included). Sol aims to be easy to use and easy to add to a project. The library is header-only for easy integration with projects.

Find it here. A run-through kind of tutorial is here! The API documentation goes over most cases (particularly, the "api/usertype" and "api/proxy" and "api/function" sections) that should still get you off your feet and going, and there's an examples directory here as well.

Sneak Peek

#include <sol.hpp>
#include <cassert>

int main() {
    sol::state lua;
    int x = 0;
    lua.set_function("beep", [&x]{ ++x; });
    lua.script("beep()");
    assert(x == 1);
}

#include <sol.hpp>
#include <cassert>

struct vars {
    int boop = 0;
};

int main() {
    sol::state lua;
    lua.new_usertype<vars>("vars", "boop", &vars::boop);
    lua.script("beep = vars.new()\n"
               "beep.boop = 1");
    assert(lua.get<vars>("beep").boop == 1);
}

More examples are given in the examples directory.

Presentations

"A Sun For the Moon - A Zero-Overhead Lua Abstraction using C++"
ThePhD
Lua Workshop 2016 - Mashape, San Francisco, CA
Deck

Creating a single header

You can grab a single header out of the library here. For stable version, check the releases tab on github for a provided single header file for maximum ease of use. A script called single.py is provided in the repository if there's some bleeding edge change that hasn't been published on the releases page. You can run this script to create a single file version of the library so you can only include that part of it. Check single.py --help for more info.

Features

• Fastest in the land (see: sol bar in graph).
• Supports retrieval and setting of multiple types including std::string and std::map/unordered_map.
• Lambda, function, and member function bindings are supported.
• Intermediate type for checking if a variable exists.
• Simple API that completely abstracts away the C stack API, including protected_function with the ability to use an error-handling function.
• operator[]-style manipulation of tables
• C++ type representations in lua userdata as usertypes with guaranteed cleanup.
• Customization points to allow your C++ objects to be pushed and retrieved from Lua as multiple consecutive objects, or anything else you desire!
• Overloaded function calls: my_function(1); my_function("Hello") in the same lua script route to different function calls based on parameters
• Support for tables, nested tables, table iteration with table.for_each / begin() and end() iterators.

Supported Compilers

Sol makes use of C++11 and C++14 features. GCC 5.x.x and Clang 3.6.x (with std=c++1z and appropriate standard library) or higher should be able to compile without problems. However, the officially supported and CI-tested compilers are:

• GCC 5.x.x+
• Clang 3.6.x+
• Visual Studio 2015 Community (Visual C++ 14.0)+

Please make sure you use the -std=c++1y, -std=c++14, -std=c++1z, -std=c++17 or better standard flags (some of these flags are the defaults in later versions of GCC 6+ and better).

Older compilers (GCC 4.9.x, Clang 3.4.x seem to be the lowest) can work with versions as late as v2.17.5, with the flag -std=c++14 or -std=c++1y.

License

Sol is distributed with an MIT License. You can see LICENSE.txt for more info.