Tag: guide

Lua Template Engine Yet Again

Posted on August 28, 2022

Introduction After writing a template engine in Lua, I found some deficiencies and wrote a few more iterations. After having used the template engine for quite a while, I’ve made a few enhancements and some fixes. This is hopefully the final version of the template engine. <h1... Continue reading

Binary Search and Insert

Posted on January 18, 2018

Introduction When dealing with arrays it’s often necessary to keep their elements in sorted order. The easiest way is to use an insert algorithm that always puts element into the array in sorted order. That said, you don’t know where elements will end up in the array because if... Continue reading

Base64 Encode and Decode in C

Posted on November 18, 2017

Introduction A very popular way to encode binary data is Base64. The basis of this is an encoding table. As you might expect, there are 64 total characters that go into the tale. There are multiple implementations of base64 with slight differences. They are all the same except for... Continue reading

Hex Encode and Decode in C

Posted on September 24, 2017

Introduction A very common task when working with binary data in C is, converting it to and from Hex. It’s unfortunate that C doesn’t provide a standard function that can take care of this for us. However, it’s pretty easy to implement a set of functions to handle it.... Continue reading

Wrapping C++ objects in C

Posted on August 18, 2017

Introduction Using C functions from C++ is very easy but going the other way isn’t. However, it can be done with a little ingenuity. Really, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. I’ll use a simple adder for the object. It takes an integer as a starting value and... Continue reading

JNI is (Not) Your Friend

Posted on July 9, 2017

Introduction So far we’ve scratched the surface of using JNI when we looked at wrapping a C library and Calling Java from C. Now we’re going to look into some more complex uses. Java Class Since we’re working with JNI, we’ll need a Java class to... Continue reading

Calling Java From C

Posted on June 17, 2017

Introduction Obviously, JNI lets you call Java functions and use Java classes in C. Typical a Java app is the one calling into C. Now Let’s say you don’t have a Java app that kicks off the process but you want your C app to still use some Java... Continue reading

Wrapping a C library in Java

Posted on June 6, 2017

Introduction It can’t be argued that Java is popular and successful. It is consistently the number one language on TIOBE’s popularity list, above C which comes in as number two. This ranking is based on popularity and doesn’t mean Java is more used than C but that doesn’t change... Continue reading

Lua Template Engine Revisited

Posted on May 7, 2015

Introduction A while ago I wrote a template engine in Lua. This engine was fairly basic and I wrote it for work as a proof of concept. It was meant as a way to see this was a viable solution. After moving forward with the project I found... Continue reading

Extending an Application with Lua Plugins

Posted on August 16, 2014

Introduction A very common use of the Lua language (which is a very versatile) is using Lua to extend an application via plugins. Many popular games use Lua for this very purpose. Adding a plugin framework to an existing application is trivial with Lua. Also, Lua provides a very... Continue reading

Using Lua as a Templating Engine

Posted on August 6, 2014

Introduction There are a lot of templating engines to choose from. The vast majority of which are primarily geared toward the web. Meaning they’re specially designed for outputting HTML/XML documents. Lua provides more flexibility and can easily be used as a general templating engine. Also, Lua is very easy... Continue reading

Wrapping a Lua module in C

Posted on August 2, 2014

Introduction So far I’ve covered wrapping a C library in Lua, writing a Lua module, and calling Lua from C. The next step is using this knowledge to wrap a Lua module in C. Basically, the opposite of wrapping a C library in Lua for use... Continue reading

Calling Lua From C

Posted on July 26, 2014

Introduction One very useful feature of Lua is how easy it is to work with from C. Unlike other scripting languages Lua’s C support goes to and from. Meaning you not only can call C from Lua but you can call Lua from C. Often you’ll see applications written... Continue reading

Writing Lua Modules

Posted on July 19, 2014

Introduction With Lua 5.2 the recommended way to write modules changed. Instead of using module(“mymodule”, package.seeall) the recommendation now is to create a local table, put all of the module’s functions in it and return the table. The big difference is a local table does not register the module... Continue reading

Wrapping a C library in Lua

Posted on July 12, 2014

Introduction An often overlooked feature of Lua is the C API. The most common use I’ve seen is to allow Lua scripts to use existing C libraries instead of reimplementing existing functionality in pure Lua (which is not always feasible). Fortunately, Lua has very strong integration with C and... Continue reading

Wrapping a C library in COM/ActiveX

Posted on April 8, 2012

Introduction Not very long ago my boss walked up to my desk, put a pile of books down beside me and said “Not it”. The books were all related to COM programming. The project he gave me was to create a COM wrapper for an existing C library we... Continue reading

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