Abstract

Scripting languages can be, and are embedded in a wide variety of projects to enhance their extensibility and user customisation. However a great deal of care may be needed to select the appropriate language for your project: Setting up an API for scripting languages utilising programming paradigms foreign to your project may require a large amount of work, while other languages may be less popular – and thus less user friendly – or not set up to support easy integration.

In this talk, we will present Lua, a popular scripting language designed for embedded use, which utilises metafeatures to adapt to most API paradigms while remaining lightweight and fast enough to minimise the cost of its implementation. We will discuss the features and basics of the language, as well as its C API , and provide examples for how it can be embedded in one’s projects.