Introducing Lutok: A lightweight C++ API for Lua

Lutok provides thin C++ wrappers around the Lua C API to ease the interaction between C++ and Lua. These wrappers make intensive use of RAII to prevent resource leakage, expose C++-friendly data types, report errors by means of exceptions and ensure that the Lua stack is always left untouched in the face of errors. The library also provides a small subset of miscellaneous utility functions built on top of the wrappers.

Lutok focuses on providing a clean and safe C++ interface; the drawback is that it is not suitable for performance-critical environments. In order to implement error-safe C++ wrappers on top of a Lua C binary library, Lutok adds several layers or abstraction and error checking that go against the original spirit of the Lua C API and thus degrade performance.

Lutok was originally developed within Kyua but was later split into its own project to make it available to general developers.