Building a C++ project with the Lua library

Building your C++ project with the Lua library has the benefit of not having to include the 100+ Lua source files in your project and your source control system. However, it has some disadvantages as well. For example, if your project needs to support multiple platforms, you will need to maintain multiple pre-compiled libraries. In such a case, building from the Lua source code might be easier.

Creating a project to work with the Lua library

In the previous section, we built the Lua library from the source code. Now, let’s extract it to use within our project.

Remember the Makefile in the root of the source code folder? Open it and you will find the two lines shown here:

TO_INC= lua.h luaconf.h lualib.h lauxlib.h lua.hpp
TO_LIB= liblua.a

These are the header files and the static library you need.

Create a folder for your project. Within it, create an empty source file named main.cpp, an empty Makefile, and two empty...