for example i have this:
static int callFunction(lua_State* L)
{
int p = lua_gettop(L);
if (p == 1 && lua_isfunction(L, -1)) {
/*
* now i need something like "get the function thats in the first parametre
*/
}
return 0;
}
now i need to get the function thats in the first parametre of the function in this C++ code, sry for not being clear, i suck at explaining.
If you need to call the function, you can use lua_call. Lua however won't allow you to take any sort of useful pointer to Lua functions. If you want to store a function in Lua, then you will have to use the Lua registry to store it.
If you want to store a "pointer" to a Lua function in C++, you could just store the /name/ of the Lua function and then do as DeadMG says and call it with lua_call, as here: http://pgl.yoyo.org/luai/i/lua_call .
If you are stuck with the code you have already, it's kind of a sticky problem; I'm not sure you can get the name of the Lua function from the stack you have. In other words, you may need to modify the code one level up from what you posted.
I'm guessing that you might want to look into the lua_tocfunction() function.
Related
That probably wasn't very clear. Say I have a char *a = "reg". Now, I want to write a function that, on reading the value of a, instantiates an object of a particular class and names it reg.
So for example, say I have a class Register, and a separate function create(char *). I want something like this:
void create(char *s) //s == "reg"
{
//what goes here?
Register reg; // <- this should be the result
}
It should be reusable:
void create(char *s) //s == "second"
{
//what goes here?
Register second; // <- this should be the result
}
I hope I've made myself clear. Essentially, I want to treat the value in a variable as a separate variable name. Is this even possible in C/C++? If not, anything similar? My current solution is to hash the string, and the hash table would store the relevant Register object at that location, but I figured that was pretty unnecessary.
Thanks!
Variable names are compile-time artifacts. They don't exist at runtime. It doesn't make sense in C++ to create a dynamically-named variable. How would you refer to it?
Let's say you had this hypothetical create function, and wrote code like:
create("reg");
reg.value = 5;
This wouldn't compile, because the compiler doesn't know what reg refers to in the second line.
C++ doesn't have any way to look up variables at runtime, so creating them at runtime is a nonstarter. A hash table is the right solution for this. Store objects in the hash table and look them up by name.
This isn't possible. C++ does not offer any facilities to process code at runtime. Given the nature of a typical C++ implementation (which compiles to machine code ahead of time, losing all information about source code), this isn't even remotely feasible.
Like I said in my comment:
What's the point? A variable name is something the compiler, but -most importantly- you, the programmer, should care about. Once the application is compiled, the variable name could be whatever... it could be mangled and senseless, it doesn't matter anymore.
You read/write code, including var-names. Once compiled, it's down to the hardware to deal with it.
Neither C nor C++ have eval functions
Simply because: you only compile what you need, eval implies input later-on that may make no sense, or require other dependencies.
C/C++ are compiled ahead of time, eval implies evaluation at runtime. The C process would then imply: pre-process, compile and link the string, in such a way that it still is part of the current process...
Even if it were possible, eval is always said to be evil, that goes double for languages like the C family that are meant to run reliably, and are often used for time-critical operations. The right tool for the job and all that...
A HashTable with objects that have hash, key, Register, collision members is the sensible thing to do. It's not that much overhead anyway...
Still feel like you need this?
Look into the vast number of scripting languages that are out there. Perl, Python... They're all better suited to do this type of stuff
If you need some variable creation and lookup you can either:
Use one of the scripting languages, as suggested by others
Make the lookup explicitly, yourself. The simplest approach is by using a map, which would map a string to your register object. And then you can have:
std::map<const char*, Register*> table;
Register* create(const char* name) {
Register* r = new Register();
table[name] = r;
return r;
}
Register* lookup(const char* name) {
return table[name];
}
void destroy(const char* name) {
delete table[name];
table.erase(name);
}
Obviously, each time you want to access a variable created this way, you have to go through the call to lookup.
I'm working on creating a user-level thread library and what I want to do is run a function inside a stub and so I would like to pass the function pointer to the stub function.
Here is my stub function:
void _ut_function_stub(void (*f)(void), int id)
{
(*f)();
DeleteThread(id);
}
This is what the user calls. What I want to do is get pointer of _ut_function_stub to assign to pc and I've tried various different options including casting but the compiler keeps saying "invalid use of void expression".
int CreateThread (void (*f) (void), int weight)
{
... more code
pc = (address_t)(_ut_function_stub(f, tcb->id));
... more code
}
Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
If you're interested in implementing your own user-level-threads library, I'd suggest looking into the (now deprecated) ucontext implementation. Specifically, looking at the definitions for the structs used in ucontext.h will help you see all the stuff you actually need to capture to get a valid snapshot of the thread state.
What you're really trying to capture with the erroneous (address_t) cast in your example is the current continuation. Unfortunately, C doesn't support first-class continuations, so you're going to be stuck doing something much more low-level, like swapping stacks and dumping registers (hence why I pointed you to ucontext as a reference—it's going to be kind of complicated if you really want to get this right).
I have the following code in Lua:
ABC:
test (X)
The test function is implemented in C + +. My problem is this: I need to know what the variable name passed as parameter (in this case X). In C + + only have access to the value of this variable, but I must know her name.
Help please
Functions are not passed variables; they are passed values. Variables are just locations that store values.
When you say X somewhere in your Lua code, that means to get the value from the variable X (note: it's actually more complicated than that, but I won't get into that here).
So when you say test(X), you're saying, "Get the value from the variable X and pass that value as the first parameter to the function test."
What it seems like you want to do is change the contents of X, right? You want to have the test function modify X in some way. Well, you can't really do that directly in Lua. Nor should you.
See, in Lua, you can return values from functions. And you can return multiple values. Even from C++ code, you can return multiple values. So whatever it is you wanted to store in X can just be returned:
X = test(X)
This way, the caller of the function decides what to do with the value, not the function itself. If the caller wants to modify the variable, that's fine. If the caller wants to stick it somewhere else, that's also fine. Your function should not care one way or the other.
Also, this allows the user to do things like test(5). Here, there is no variable; you just pass a value directly. That's one reason why functions cannot modify the "variable" that is passed; because it doesn't have to be a variable. Only values are passed, so the user could simply pass a literal value rather than one stored in a variable.
In short: you can't do it, and you shouldn't want to.
The correct answer is that Lua doesn't really support this, but there is the debug interface. See this question for the solution you're looking for. If you can't get a call to debug to work directly from C++, then wrap your function call with a Lua function that first extracts the debug results and then calls your C++ function.
If what you're after is a string representation of the argument, then you're kind of stuck in lua.
I'm thinking something like in C:
assert( x==y );
Which generates a nice message on failure. In C this is done through macros.
Something like this (untested and probably broken).
#define assert(X) if(!(X)) { printf("ASSERION FAILED: %s\n", #X ); abort(); }
Here #X means the string form of the arguments. In the example above that is "x==y". Note that this is subtly different from a variable name - its just the string used in the parser when expanding the macro.
Unfortunately there's no such corresponding functionality in lua. For my lua testing libraries I end up passing the stringified version as part of the expression, so in lua my code looks something like this:
assert( x==y, "x==y")
There may be ways to make this work as assert("x==y") using some kind of string evaluation and closure mechanism, but it seemed to tricky to be worth doing to me.
EDIT:
While this doesn't appear to be possible in pure lua, there's a patched version that does seem to support macros: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaMacros . They even have an example of a nicer assert.
All,
I am writing a small c++ app and have been stumped by this issue. Is there a way to create (and later catch ) the error while accessing element from va_list macro using va_arg if element type is not expected. Eg:-
count=va_arg(argp,int);
if (count <= 0 || count > 30)
{
reportParamError(); return;
}
Now, if I am passing a typedef instead of int, I get garbage value on MS compiler but 95% of time count gets value 0 on gcc (on 64 bit sles10 sys). Is there a way I can enforce some typechecking, so that I get an error that can be caught in a catch block?
Any ideas on this would be very helpful to me. Or is there a better way to do this. The function prototype is:-
void process(App_Context * pActx, ...)
The function is called as
process(pAtctx,3,type1,type2,type3);
It is essential for pActx to be passed as 1st parameter and hence cannot pass count as 1st parameter.
Update-1
Ok, this sounds strange but nargs does not seem to part of va_list on sles10 gcc. I had to put in
#ifdef _WIN32
tempCount=va_arg(argp,int)
#endif
After using this, parameters following nargs do not get garbage values. However, this introduces compiler/platform based #ifdefs....Thanks Chris and Kristopher
If you know a count will always be passed as the second argument, then you could always change the signature to this:
void process(App_Context * pActx, int count, ...)
If that's not an option, then there is really no way to catch it. That's just how the variable-argument-list stuff works: there is no way for the callee to know what arguments are being passed, other than whatever information the caller passes.
If you look into how the va_arg macro and related macros are implemented, you may be able to figure out how to inspect all the stuff on the stack. However, this would not be portable, and it is not recommended except as a debugging aid.
You also might want to look into alternatives to variable-arguments, like function overloading, templates, or passing a vector or list of arguments.
No, there is no way. varargs doesn't provide any way to check the types of parameters passed in. You must only read them with the correct type which means that you need another way of communicating type information.
You are likely to be better off avoiding varargs functionality unless you really need it. It's only really a C++ feature for the sake of legacy functions such as printf and friends.
The title probably sounds a bit recursive - but this is what I am trying to do:
I have C++ classes Foo and Foobar;
I am using tolua++ to export them to Lua
In Lua:
function wanna_be_starting_something()
foo = Foo:new()
fb = Foobar:new()
-- do something
foo.setResult(42) -- <- I want to store something back at the C++ end
end
In C++
int main(int argc, char argv[])
{
MyResult res;
LuaEngine * engine = new LuaEngine();
engine->run('wbs-something.lua');
// I now want to be able to access the stored result, in variable res
};
So my question is this: how do I pass data from a C++ object that is being manipulated by Lua, back into a C++ program?
To understand how to exchange data back and forth, you should learn about the Lua stack that is the structure Lua uses to communicate with the host program. I guess tolua++ takes care of this for the classes/methods you exported.
Here there is a good start: http://www.lua.org/pil/24.html is for Lua 5.0 but there are indications on how to make it work with 5.1 (which I assume is the Lua version you're using).
If you don't want to dig into all the details, you can always resort to create an ad-hoc C++ method that sets values into a global object. Not the cleanest way, IMHO, but could work.
I don't know tolua++, but both luabind and luabridge support what you need:
* option 1 is just to have the lua code do return whatever and you'll get the that in C++. This require that you'll have a template based version of run(), which returns a value.
* option 2 is to use the lua engine to define a function and then use the engine's call method with the function name and parameters. There are several implementations of LuaEngine which support such a call:
LuaEngine * engine = new LuaEngine();
engine->run("function a(v) return v . 'a'; end ");
valua = engine->call("a", argument);