announcing honeysuckle

announcing honeysuckle
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2021-05-23

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As I’ve been working on various projects for the past couple of years -I have continued to find that a combination of C and Lua is my favorite -way to write code. The ongoing development of my game engine honey -uses that pair and I’m planning on using it (whenever I get around to it) for my dream -atlas project. But, and I’ll be the first -to admit this, the C API is a little clunky. -I don’t generally mind that all too much (after all, one of my favorite things about -both C and Lua is that they’re languages you can carry around in your head, and having -a very explicit API means you only need to understand the fundamental concepts to use it) -but it does mean that dev work goes a bit slower.

I did a good bit of work streamlining the process of writing Lua bindings in C when -tinkering with honey and ever since then I’ve found myself peeking back at that code -and re-implementing it in other projects. A colleague of mine once said that the time -to write a library is when you’ve done something once, you’re doing it now, and you -re pretty sure you’ll do it again, and I think I’ve quite handily cleared that condition -So! I’m splitting that code out and refactoring it into its own library which, due -to its historical roots, I’ve chosen to call honeysuckle.

honeysuckle is still under development – the API is a bit different from the one I -came up with when working on honey and imo is easier to use – but when it’s ready -it will provide a whole host of helpful functions that make integrating Lua scripting -into C applications simple and fast. I am (attempting) to employ readme-driven development -so I’ve written up a readme for honeysuckle. Any feedback on the proposed API and -features would be much appreciated! As of writing, honeysuckle is planned to include -functions for parsing arguments to C functions from Lua, creating and processing tables -throwing and handling Lua errors, using the Lua registry, and creating printf-formatted strings.

I’ve already created a repository for honeysuckle. There’s just a README in there -for now, but that will probably have changed even just later today, since I’m planning -on working on it more this afternoon. :p

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