Lua Tutorial

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Design Purpose

Its design purpose is to be embedded in applications, thereby providing flexible extension and customization capabilities for applications.

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Lua Features

• Lightweight: It is written in standard C and open as source code. After compilation, it is only a little over 100K, and can be easily embedded into other programs.
• Extensible: Lua provides very easy-to-use extension interfaces and mechanisms: the host language (usually C or C++) provides these functions, and Lua can use them as if they were built-in features.
• Other Features:
  • Supports procedure-oriented programming and functional programming;
  • Automatic memory management; only provides a general-purpose type of table, which can be used to implement arrays, hash tables, sets, and objects;
  • Built-in pattern matching; closures; functions can also be viewed as a value; provides support for multithreading (coroutines, not threads supported by the operating system);
  • Through closures and tables, it can conveniently support some key mechanisms needed in object-oriented programming, such as data abstraction, virtual functions, inheritance, and overloading.

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Lua Application Scenarios

• Game Development
• Standalone Application Scripts
• Web Application Scripts
• Extensions and database plugins such as: MySQL Proxy and MySQL WorkBench
• Security systems, such as intrusion detection systems

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First Lua Program

The file extension of Lua code files is.lua。

Next, we use Lua to output "Hello World!"

After running, it will display Hello, world! on the screen.

Other Extensions