Simplify tolua++ with autotools

In Ember we use Lua for our scripting needs. The bindings to the C++ parts of the client are provided by the tolua++ library. Tolua++ works by generating C++ source code from .pkg files, which are simplified .h files. This works out extremely well; the developer only needs to copy the .h file to a similarly named .pkg file and remove those methods and fields that shouldn't be exported. The command line tool "tolua++" is then run to produce the C++ source.

Previously in Ember we handled all of this by keeping the generated C++ source checked into the source, and requiring that each developer had to run the tolua++ command to regenerate these sources each time a lua binding was added or changed. This however had a couple of downsides, chief amongst them that the code generated differs a bit depending on the version of tolua++ used. It also resulted in some often very large Git commits of generated code, which tended to pollute the Git history.

A much better solution would be to instead automate the generation of the binding source, and bake it into the normal build system. Fortunately the Autotools already provides all the facilities for making this happen.

An example of how this is handled in Ember though a Makefile.am can be found here:

SUFFIXES: .cxx .pkg .lo .la .cpp .o .obj

.pkg.cxx:
 cd $(srcdir) && TOLUAXX=${TOLUAXX} $(abs_top_srcdir)/scripts/update_lua_bindings.sh `basename $@ .cxx` `basename $@ .cxx`.pkg $(abs_builddir)/`basename $@` $<

INCLUDES = -I$(top_srcdir)/src -I$(srcdir) -I$(top_builddir)/src -DPREFIX=\"@prefix@\"

noinst_LIBRARIES = liblua_EmberServices.a
liblua_EmberServices_a_SOURCES = EmberServices.cxx

CLEANFILES = EmberServices.cxx
TOLUA_PKGS = ConfigService.pkg EmberServices.pkg IInputAdapter.pkg Input.pkg InputService.pkg LoggingService.pkg MetaserverService.pkg ScriptingService.pkg ServerService.pkg
EXTRA_DIST = $(TOLUA_PKGS)
EmberServices.cxx: $(TOLUA_PKGS)

The files references in TOLUA_PKG are the .pkg files which define the bindings. These will be fed through the update_lua_bindings.sh script to generate the file EmberServices.cxx, which is then compiled and added to the liblua_EmberService.a archive. Note that we need to add EmberServices.css to the CLEANFILES variable to make sure that it's deleted when we're cleaning up. Since it's generated through the tolua++ tool Automake can't keep track of it itself.

The update_lua_bindings.sh script looks like this:

 #! /bin/sh
 #tolua++ will for some reason translate "const std::string" into "const,std::string", so we need to remove these incorrect commas from the final code
 #some versions will also for some unexplainable reason not correctly remove the tolua specific directive tolua_outside, so we need to clean that out also
 #We'll also replace the inclusion of "tolua++.h" with our own version which has better support for building on win32.
 echo "Updating lua bindings."

 #If the TOLUAXX environment variable isn't set default to using the command "tolua++".
 if [ x${TOLUAXX} = x ]; then
 TOLUAXX=tolua++
 fi
 ${TOLUAXX} -n $1 $2 > $3
 grep -q '** tolua internal error' $3 && cat $3 && exit 1
 sed -i -e 's/const,/const /g' -e 's/tolua_outside//g' -e 's/tolua++\.h/components\/lua\/tolua++\.h/' $3

This script basically runs the tolua++ command, as defined in the TOLUAXX environment variable (with "tolua++" as fallback) and then applies some replacement to fix some issues we've been having with the generated code.

The TOLUAXX environment variable is set at configuration time. The default is "tolua++", but we'll provide the option to use an alternative command. Our acinclude.m4 file has this snippet (which is called from configure.ac):

AC_DEFUN([AM_CHECK_TOLUAXX],
[
 AC_ARG_WITH(tolua++,AS_HELP_STRING([--with-tolua++=CMD],[Tolua++ command (default=tolua++)]),
    toluaxx_command="$withval", toluaxx_command="tolua++")

 AC_CHECK_TOOL(TOLUAXX, $toluaxx_command)

 if test "x$TOLUAXX" = "x"; then
  AC_MSG_ERROR([Could not find a working tolua++ command (tried '$toluaxx_command'). Use the --with-tolua++ switch to set the proper command to use.])
 fi
])

This setup will allow the script bindings to be generated at compile time, but only the first time compilation occurs, or if any of the .pkg files have changed. More examples of how this is used can be found in the Ember sources.