RubyLuaBridge

RubyLuaBridge lets you access Lua from Ruby. Eventually, support for accessing Ruby from Lua will be added. This documentation assumes basic knowledge of Ruby and Lua.

This is a fork of the original BitBucket repository that packages the files into a RubyGem.

Relevant web pages:

• RubyLuaBridge Homepage
• RubyForge Project
• BitBucket Repository

Installation

This fork of RubyLuaBridge has packaged the files as a RubyGem. To build the gem and install:

% gem build rubyluabridge.gemspec
% gem install rubyluabridge-0.7.0 -- --with-lua-include=/usr/include/lua5.1 --with-lualib=lua5.1

You should replace the Lua configuration options with your appropriate platform's locations.

Design Philosophy

• Simplest marshalling possible
• Simplest API possible
• Do more complicated things in Lua itself, rather than exposing them! For example, the coroutine library is not explicitly exposed because it can be handled all through eval and indexing: l.coroutine.create(f)

Ruby to Lua Type Mapping

Ruby	Lua
nil	nil
None	nil
True	true
False	false
Fixnum	number
Bignum	number
Float	number
String	string
Symbol	string
Hash	new Lua::Table clone
Array	new Lua::Table clone
Other	lightuserdata

Lua to Ruby Type Mapping

Lua	Ruby
none	nil
nil	nil
true	True
false	False
number	Float
string	String
table	Lua::Table
lightuserdata	Lua::RefObject
function	Lua::RefObject
userdata	Lua::RefObject
thread	Lua::RefObject

To Do

• Stack trace in error callback
• How to get some external lua_State there?
• How to deal with .clone() and .dup()?
• Accessing Ruby from Lua

Credits

The following persons have contributed to RubyLuaBridge:

• Evan Wies (evan a neomantra d net)

RubyLuaBridge is inspired by, but not derived from:

• Lunatic Python
• ruby-lua

Support

• RubyLuaBridge Homepage
• RubyForge Project

Download the latest sources from there. Please use the mailing list and issue tracking features as well.

I am particularly interested in problems you may have on various systems. I have tested it in Ubuntu Linux and OS X.