Comprehensive Lua

Familiarity with at least one other programming language. Programming experience. Optionally if you have familiarity with other scripting languages, that will make it easier to understand Lua.

Lua is an easy to use scripting language that is used as an embedded plugin/extension language in different products. For example, it is the embedded scripting language of network applications like nmap and wireshark, and can also be found as a scripting language in World of Warcraft, Orbiter and other games.

Lua can also be used as a standalone language. It is a lightweight, multi-paradigm programming language and therefore the course teaches various concepts that students will find useful in other areas of software engineering as well.

This course covers everything out there to know about Lua. We build up from the basic programming constructs, learn about advanced techniques and finally talk about embedding of Lua into other programming languages and embedding other programming languages into Lua. The course contains a lot of programming exercises, so that newcomers can gain proficiency with the language, starting from scratch.

Introduction to Lua

• A bit of history
• Lua's goals, features and non-goals
• Resources of Lua documentation and tutorials
• Installing the Lua interpreter
• Setting up and using LuaRocks

Basic syntax and semantics

• Identifiers
• Comments, block comments
• Global variables and enforcing of strictness
• Local variables
• Standalone programs, program arguments
• Compilation units, chunks, expressions, semicolons

Data types and data structures

• Basic types: nil, boolean, number, string
• Object types: function, userdata, thread, table
• References/objects vs. basic values
• The importance of tables in Lua

Introduction to tables and their versatility

• Tables as an associative array
• Tables as numeric arrays, sequences

Basic control structures

• The if then elseif else end
• The while loop
• The repeat loop
• The simple for loop

Error handling

• Return values vs exceptions
• Converting a return value to an exception
• Converting an exception to a return value
• Error levels

Example programs

• Polynomial evaluation
• Breadth first search
• Additional exercises

More about functions

• Named arguments
• Object-oriented calls
• Closures
• Currying
• Tail calls
• Multiple assignment and return
• Varargs

Iterators and co-routines

• The generic for loop
• Stateless vs stateful iterators
• Differences between iterators and co-routines

Metatables and metamethods

• The set example
• The __tostring metamethod
• Arithmetic metamethods
• The __index, __newindex metamethods
• The __len metamethod

Modules and packages

• Using modules
• Creating modules
• Organizing modules into packages

Advanced tables

• Tables for queues and stacks
• Tables describing graphs
• Matrices as tables
• Linked lists as tables
• String buffers

Metatables through examples

• Proxies
• Readonly
• Memoization
• Dynamic programming with memoization
• The Fibonacci example

Environments

• Relationship between global variables and environments
• Free variables
• The _ENV table and the _G table

More about modules

• Different approaches to creating modules
• Modules that change the behavior
• Module initialization and arguments
• Using environments to implement safe modules

Advanced iterators and co-routines

• Producer, consumer, filter
• Wrapping co-routines to get iterators
• Stateless iterator for linked lists

Contributing to the Ecosystem

• Uploading packages to MoonRocks

Functional paradigm in Lua

• The map function
• The reduce / fold function

Object-oriented Programming

• Different approaches to OOP
• Different approaches to inheritance
• Examples

A walkthrough of the Lua Standard Libraries

Compilation

• Compilation
• Eval
• Relationship with the environment
• Binary chunks

Garbage collection

• Weak tables
• Finalizers, the __gc meta-method

Lua bytecode and virtual machine

• Generating bytecode from source code
• Reading and analyzing bytecode
• Quick tour of the source code of the Lua VM

C modules

• Calling C from Lua
• Search path and loading of C modules

Calling Lua from C

• The Stack
• Error handling
• Continuations

Handling Lua values and types from C

• Arrays
• Strings
• Userdata
• Metatables
• Object oriented calls
• Light userdata

Memory management

• Allocators
• GC API

Threads in Lua

• Co-routines vs threads
• Real multi-threading and Lua states