AluminumLua

What?

A fast, lightweight Lua scripting engine written entirely in C#. It's called 'AluminumLua' (or 'alua' for short) as a poke at all those "iron" languages...

Architecture

AluminumLua does not use the DLR. Instead of generating an AST, the parser calls directly into an interface (IExecutor), that represents abstracted stack-based execution actions, such as Assignment or function Call.

This design enables different pluggable execution backends. Currently there is an InterpreterExecutor that directly executes the actions while the script is being parsed, and a CompilerExecutor that compiles a DynamicMethod.

The default execution policy uses the interpreter for the main script body and generates DynamicMethods for any defined function bodies.

Dependencies

.NET 4.0+ is required on Windows, or Mono 2.10+ anywhere else. There are no other dependencies.

Embed it

var context = new LuaContext ();
context.AddBasicLibrary ();
context.AddIoLibrary ();

context.SetGlobal ("some_func_in_lua", calls_this_func_in_csharp);
context.SetGlobal ("random_string", "hello");
// ...

var parser = new LuaParser (context, file_name); // < or leave file_name out to read stdin
parser.Parse ();

Building

Use Premake to generate a makefile or Visual Studio solution. Get it here: http://industriousone.com/premake/download

GNU Make

premake4 gmake
make

Visual Studio / Xamarin Studio / MonoDevelop / SharpDevelop

premake4 vs2010
(build the solution using your favorite tool)

The build produces the following products:

• AluminumLua.dll is the script engine that can be referenced in other projects.
• alua.exe is the command line interpreter. Pass a script file name or no arguments for a REPL.

Both products are self-contained and do not depend on the other.

After the Build

Run tests

premake4 test

Clean

premake4 clean

License

MIT/X11