sol2/README.md

## Sol 2.8

[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/ThePhD/sol2.svg?branch=develop)](https://travis-ci.org/ThePhD/sol2)
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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.

## Documentation

Find it [here](http://sol2.rtfd.org/). A run-through kind of tutorial is [here](http://sol2.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial/all-the-things.html)! 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](https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2/tree/develop/examples) as well.

## Sneak Peek

```cpp
#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);
}
```

```cpp
#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.

## Creating a single header

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](http://satoren.github.io/lua_binding_benchmark/) (see: sol2 graph and table entries).
- 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 `usertype`s with guaranteed cleanup
- 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`.

## Supported Compilers

Sol makes use of C++11/14 features. GCC 4.9 and Clang 3.4 (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 4.9.0+
- Clang 3.5+
- Visual Studio 2015 Community (Visual C++ 14.0)+

## Caveats

Due to how this library is used compared to the C API, the Lua Stack is completely abstracted away. Not only that, but all
Lua errors are thrown as exceptions instead: if you don't want to deal with errors thrown by at_panic, you can set your own panic function or use the `protected_function` API. This allows you to handle the errors gracefully without being forced to exit. If you don't want to deal with exceptions, then define `SOL_NO_EXCEPTIONS`. If you also don't like RTTI, you can also define `SOL_NO_RTTI` as well. These macros are automatically defined if the code detects certain compiler-specific macros being turned on or off based on flags like `-fno-rtti` and `-fno-exceptions`

It should be noted that the library itself depends on `lua.hpp` to be found by your compiler. It uses angle brackets, e.g.
`#include <lua.hpp>`.

## License

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