[erlang-questions] Calling into Lua from Erlang

[cyril romain]

Hi,

Robert Raschke wrote:

I will need to call Lua scripts from within Erlang soon. I was
wondering if anyone has already looked into a slightly closer binding
than calling an external program to run the Lua script and marshalling
via stdin/out?

I am currently undecided whether to make the Lua API available to be
invoked from Erlang (via a linked-in driver) or if it might be more
useful to write a Lua library that allows a Lua script to function as
an Erlang node (similar to the Erlang Jinterface lib for Java).

I would gratefully receive opinions and wisdom on this kind of stuff


I'm please to announce the creation of erlua, a project I started some month
ago to enable seamless interoperability between Erlang and the Lua
programming language.
Since no such binding is available in the FOSS world, I decided to make it
free software.

Erlua actually provides a C node (using EI interface only) that supports:
- almost all conversions between Erlang types and lua types
- syntax checking of lua file or code chunk
- execution of lua file or lua code chunk from Erlang
- getting/setting lua table and fields from Erlang
- lua function calls from Erlang
- remote Erlang procedure call from lua

Erlua can be use for various purposes: to read configuration files written
in lua, to embed a lightweight scripting language (lua) into an Erlang
application, to use lua libraries from Erlang ... and many other ideas that
probably comes to your mind :-)
Future work: improve Erlang binding from Lua (e.g. to spawn processes and
send Erlang messages from Lua), so that even more crazy things can be
achieved !

Code is freely available under GPL at http://gitorious.org/erlua

Happy hacking,

Cyril