Tutorial

LuaD Tutorial

LuaD is a bridge between the D and Lua programming languages. Unlike many other libraries built on the Lua C API, LuaD doesn't expose the Lua stack - instead, it has wrappers for references to Lua objects, and supports seamlessly and directly converting any D type into a Lua type and vice versa. This makes it very easy to use and encourages a much less error-prone style of programming, as well as boosting productivity by a substantial order. Due to D's powerful generic programming capabilities, performance remains the same as the equivalent using the C API.

LuaD is designed to be easy to use regardless of your knowledge of the Lua stack and the Lua C API - no usage of LuaD assumes any knowledge of the C API, and neither does this tutorial. But LuaD isn't just easy to use. Even if you are familiar with the C API, LuaD can drastically increase productivity and reduce bugs in your Lua handling code.

Typically, only code specifically interacting with a Lua state (see below) needs to use the LuaD API - the rest can be written as regular D code and the glue will be handled by LuaD. Sometimes you want to interact with Lua in ways that aren't clearly expressible in D; types wrapping Lua references are provided for these cases.

Tutorial Index

This tutorial is a work in progress. Chapter contributions and amendments are welcome!

• the Lua State
• Type Conversions