How can I embed Lua in Java?

Question

Is LuaJava a must for this? Or can I embed Lua into Java without it?

Organism

I'm guessing that you'd prefer a pure-Java implementation of Lua (instead of LuaJava which uses native bits)? Or are you just looking for any alternative implementation? – Before

A pure java implementation of LUA simply does not exist, and probably will never exist. It is a "C" project, and porting all that C to code java would be a huge undertaking, and I doubt the LUA authors see much benefit to that. – Recondite

@Recondite actually most of the work is already done, about 10 years ago I ported the entire Lua 5.1.4 package to C# (and yes, it was a huge undertaking). A port from that to Java would, I imagine, be considerably easier. – Anthrax

Answer 1

LuaJ is easy to embed in Java. I did have to change a few lines of their source to get it to work how I expected (it didn't require the IO library automatically).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/luaj/

Yellowthroat

I'm having a similar problem using Kahlua from IntelliJ. I am brand new to Lua and getting tripped up over an error, "attempted index of non-table" whenever I call "io.read()". I tried to require "io" but that doesn't work. Help? – Numismatics

Does anyone compare the implementation of luaj and luajava? – Fluorosis

Answer 2

Try also kahlua and Mochalua.

Selfinduced

Kahlua now located on github, but not updated since 2013. Mochalua appears to have never been migrated off of Google Code, and is now archived; there are 4 versions on github, but none have been touched since 2015 and all just have the original 7 commits from the Google Code version from 2008-12-08. – Tarantula

Answer 3

There is http://www.keplerproject.org/luajava/manual.html, but essentially lua is more suitable for integration with C. There are a bunch of other scripting languages with good java integration around though. Consider groovy, jruby or jython for starters.

Penley

in this case I am stuck with lua otherwise I would go with jython being a python fan boy – Organism

To embed Jython is trivial, if that helps :P – Deflected

Answer 4

Lua is a C library, you can embed it in Java but you'll have to interface the java virtual machine and Lua with some C code.

The LuaJava authors have already done that work - you're better off using that than writing your own.

Cohl