rufus-lua

Lua embedded in Ruby, via Ruby FFI.

(Lua 5.1.x only, no luajit out of the box).

Lua

http://www.lua.org/about.html says :

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

http://www.lua.org/

other Ruby and Lua bridges / connectors

• https://github.com/glejeune/ruby-lua by Gregoire Lejeune
• http://rubyluabridge.rubyforge.org/ by Evan Wies
• https://github.com/whitequark/rlua by Peter Zotov

getting Lua on your system

Debian GNU/Linux

On Debian GNU/Linux, I do

sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0

If your system's package manager doesn't have some version (5.1.x) of Lua around, jump to compiling liblua.dylib below or look at the LuaBinaries solution for GNU/Linux.

Rufus-lua will look for library in a list of know places.

If it doesn't find the Lua dynamic library or if it picks the wrong one, it's OK to set the LUA_LIB environment variable. For example:

LUA_LIB=~/mystuff/lualib.5.1.4.so ruby myluacode.rb

or

export LUA_LIB=~/mystuff/lualib.5.1.4.so
# ...
ruby myluacode.rb

OSX

As of 2018-10-19, this Homebrew command will install Lua and its .dylib on OSX:

brew install lua@5.1

Windows

On Windows try using rufus-lua-win gem.

using rufus-lua

gem install rufus-lua

or add to your Gemfile:

  gem 'rufus-lua'

then

require 'rufus-lua'

s = Rufus::Lua::State.new

puts s.eval("return table.concat({ 'hello', 'from', 'Lua' }, ' ')")
  #
  # => "Hello from Lua"

s.close

binding Ruby code as Lua functions

require 'rufus-lua'

s = Rufus::Lua::State.new

s.function 'key_up' do |table|
  table.inject({}) do |h, (k, v)|
    h[k.to_s.upcase] = v
    h
  end
end

p s.eval(%{
  local table = { CoW = 2, pigs = 3, DUCKS = 'none' }
  return key_up(table) -- calling Ruby from Lua...
}).to_h
  # => { 'COW' => 2.0, 'DUCKS => 'none', 'PIGS' => 3.0 }

s.close

It's OK to bind a function inside of a table (library):

require 'rufus-lua'

s = Rufus::Lua::State.new

s.eval("rubies = {}")
s.function 'rubies.add' do |x, y|
  x + y
end

p s.eval("return rubies.add(1, 2)")
  # => 3.0

s.close

You can omit the table definition (only 1 level allowed here though):

require 'rufus-lua'

s = Rufus::Lua::State.new

s.function 'rubies.add' do |x, y|
  x + y
end

p s.eval("return rubies.add(1, 2)")
  # => 3.0

s.close

The specs contain more examples:

https://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-lua/tree/master/spec/

eval(code[, binding[, filename[, lineno ]]])

The examples so far have shown Rufus::Lua::State#eval being used with a single argument, a piece of code.

But this rufus-lua eval mimics the Ruby eval and lets one specify binding, filename and lineno.

(TODO) Binding hasn't yet been implemented. It'll probaby be with setfenv but nothing sure yet. Stick a nil to it for now.

The string of Lua code may come from wild places, it may help to flag it with an arbitrary filename and a lineno.

require 'rufus-lua'

lua = Rufus::Lua::State.new

lua.eval('print("hello")', nil, 'myluastuff/hello.lua', 77)

set_error_handler

set_error_handler gives a little bit of control on how error messages are prepared when errors occur in the Lua interpreter.

Here are set of examples for each of the possible error handler kind: Lua code, Ruby block, :traceback.

require 'rufus-lua'

lua = Rufus::Lua::State.new

#
# no error handler

begin
  lua.eval('error("ouch!")')
rescue => e
  puts(e)
end
  # --> eval:pcall : '[string "line"]:1: ouch!' (2 LUA_ERRRUN)

#
# Lua error handler

lua.set_error_handler(%{
  function (msg)
    return 'something went wrong: ' .. string.gmatch(msg, ": (.+)$")()
  end
})

begin
  lua.eval('error("ouch!")')
rescue => e
  puts(e)
end
  # --> eval:pcall : 'something went wrong: ouch!' (2 LUA_ERRRUN)

#
# Ruby block error handler

lua.set_error_handler do |msg|
  ([ msg.split.last ] * 3).join(' ')
end

begin
  lua.eval('error("ouch!")')
rescue => e
  puts(e)
end
  # --> eval:pcall : 'ouch! ouch! ouch!' (2 LUA_ERRRUN)

#
# prepackaged :traceback handler

lua.set_error_handler(:traceback)

begin
  lua.eval('error("ouch!")')
rescue => e
  puts(e)
end
  # -->
  #   eval:pcall : '[string "line"]:1: ouch!
  #   stack traceback:
  #   	[C]: in function 'error'
  #   	[string "line"]:1: in main chunk' (2 LUA_ERRRUN)

#
# unset the error handler

lua.set_error_handler(nil)

begin
  lua.eval('error("ouch!")')
rescue => e
  puts(e)
end
  # --> eval:pcall : '[string "line"]:1: ouch!' (2 LUA_ERRRUN)
  # (back to default)

compiling liblua.dylib (OSX)

original instructions by Adrian Perez at:

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-09/msg00894.html

get the source at:

http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.4.tar.gz

then

tar xzvf lua-5.1.4.tar.gz
cd lua-5.1.4

Modify the file src/Makefile as per http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-09/msg00894.html

It's mostly about adding that rule to the src/Makefile:

liblua51.dylib: $(CORE_O) $(LIB_O)
	$(CC) -dynamiclib -o $@ $^ $(LIBS)

Here's how to build the library file and deploy it:

make
make macosx
make -C src liblua51.dylib
sudo cp src/liblua51.dylib /usr/local/lib/

sudo make macosx install

I tend to copy the lib with

sudo cp src/liblua.dylib /usr/local/lib/liblua.5.1.4.dylib

# instead of
#sudo cp src/liblua.dylib /usr/local/lib/

lua binaries (GNU/Linux)

Hat tip to Micka33 for pointing to LuaBinaries in issue #34

tested with

ruby 1.9.1p0, jruby 1.2.0 jruby 1.1.6 has an issue with errors raised inside of Ruby functions (callbacks)

ruby-ffi 0.4.0 and 0.5.0

I run the specs with

bundle install # first time only
bundle exec rspec

dependencies

the ruby gem 'ffi'

issue tracker

http://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-lua/issues

source

http://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-lua

git clone git://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-lua.git

authors and credits

see CREDITS.txt

license

MIT

Lua itself is licensed under the MIT license as well :

http://www.lua.org/license.html