Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Integrating Lua Into Visual Studio

I do a lot of dual-language coding for work, most of which is in C++, but an increasing amount is in a scripting language called Lua.  It's a very nice language, with a highly flexible syntax and a small footprint (~200k on-disk for the entire environment plus an additional C++ interface.)  Using it is not without its drawbacks, particularly when it relates to writing C++ code in Visual Studio.  For example, the Visual Studio debugger cannot step-into or break inside-of Lua code.  Some Lua debuggers exist, such as the one provided in the LuaPlus library, however I've yet to find one that provides a good and stable of a debugger as Visual Studio has.  Recently however, I found a V.S. add-on which supports syntax highlighting and auto-completion.  It's not quite the full Lua/V.S. integration I was/still-am hoping for, but it helps.  The add-on is called lualite and if you're a Lua programmer, or are a V.S. user who's interested in checking out Lua, I'd highly recommend taking a look.

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