rlua -- High level bindings between Rust and Lua

API Documentation

Examples

This library is a high level interface between Rust and Lua. Its major goal is to expose as easy to use, practical, and flexible of an API between Rust and Lua as possible, while also being completely safe.

There are other high level Lua bindings systems for rust, and this crate is an exploration of a different part of the design space. The other high level interface to Lua that I am aware of right now is hlua which you should definitely check out and use if it suits your needs. This crate has the following differences with hlua:

• Handles to Lua values use the Lua registry, not the stack
• Handles to Lua values are all internally mutable
• Handles to Lua values have non-mutable borrows to the main Lua object, so there can be multiple handles or long lived handles
• Targets Lua 5.3

The key difference here is that rlua handles rust-side references to Lua values in a fundamentally different way than hlua, more similar to other Lua bindings systems like Selene for C++. Values like rlua::Table and rlua::Function that hold onto Lua values in the Rust stack, instead of pointing at values in the Lua stack, are placed into the registry with luaL_ref. In this way, it is possible to have an arbitrary number of handles to internal Lua values at any time, created and destroyed in arbitrary order. This approach IS slightly slower than the approach that hlua takes of only manipulating the Lua stack, but this, combined with internal mutability, allows for a much more flexible API.

There are currently a few notable missing pieces of this API:

• Complete panic / abort safety for scripts. This is a near term goal, but currently there are ways to cause panics / aborts with lua scripts which are not considered a bug.
• Security limits on Lua code such as total instruction limits and control over which potentially dangerous libraries (e.g. io) are available to scripts.
• Lua profiling support
• "Context" or "Sandboxing" support. There should be the ability to set the _ENV upvalue of a loaded chunk to a table other than _G, so that you can have different environments for different loaded chunks.
• More fleshed out Lua API, there is some missing nice to have functionality not exposed like storing values in the registry.
• Benchmarks, and quantifying performance differences with what you would might write in C.

Additionally, there are ways I would like to change this API, once support lands in rustc. For example:

• Currently, variadics are handled entirely with tuples and traits implemented by macro for tuples up to size 12, it would be great if this was replaced with real variadic generics when this is available in rust.

It is also worth it to list some non-goals for the project:

• Be a perfect zero cost wrapper over the Lua C API
• Allow the user to do absolutely everything that the Lua C API might allow

API stability

This library is very much Work In Progress, so there is a some API churn. Currently, it follows a pre-1.0 semver, so all API changes should be accompanied by 0.x version bumps.

Safety and panics

The goal of this library is complete safety, it should not be possible to cause undefined behavior whatsoever with the API, even in edge cases. There is, however, QUITE a lot of unsafe code in this crate, and I would call the current safety level of the crate "Work In Progress". Still, UB is considered the most serious kind of bug, so if you find the ability to cause UB with this API at all, please file a bug report.

There are, however, a few ways to cause panics and even aborts with this API that are not currently considered bugs. Usually these panics or aborts are alternatives to what would otherwise be unsafety. A near term goal of this project is to remove the ability for lua to cause a panic or abort, and then panic / abort behavior will be considered a bug just like UB is, but that is currently not the case.

Panic / abort considerations when using this API:

• The API should be panic safe currently, whenever a panic is generated the Lua stack is cleared and the Lua instance should continue to be usable.
• Panic unwinds in Rust callbacks should currently be handled correctly, the unwind is caught and carried across the Lua API boundary, and Lua code cannot catch rust panics. This is done by overriding the normal Lua 'pcall' and 'xpcall' with custom versions that cannot catch rust panics being piped through the normal Lua error system.
• There are a few panics marked "internal error" that should be impossible to trigger. If you encounter one of these this is a bug.
• When the internal version of Lua is built using the gcc crate (the default), LUA_USE_APICHECK is enabled. Any abort caused by this internal Lua API checking should be considered a bug, particularly because without LUA_USE_APICHECK it would generally be unsafe.
• The library internally calls lua_checkstack to ensure that there is sufficient stack space, and if the stack cannot be sufficiently grown this is a panic. There should not be a way to cause this using the API, if you encounter this, it is a bug.
• This API attempts only to handle errors in Lua C API functions that can cause an error either directly or by running arbitrary Lua code directly, not functions that can cause memory errors (marked as 'm' in the Lua C API docs). This means that we must take care to ensure that gc or memory errors cannot occur, because this would unsafely longjmp potentially across rust frames. The allocator provided to lua is libc::malloc with an extra guard to ensure that OOM errors are immediate aborts, because otherwise this would be unsafe. Similarly, 'setmetatable' is wrapped so that any __gc metamethod specified in lua scripts will abort if the metamethod causes an error rather than longjmp like a normal error would. Lua objects can also be resurrected with user provided __gc metamethods (See here for details), and this includes userdata, so it is possible to trigger a panic from lua by resurrecting a userdata and re-using it after it has been garbage collected. It is an eventual goal of the library to ensure that lua scripts cannot cause panics or aborts, but currently this is not true and this is a known limitation. Lua scripts should NOT be able to cause unsafety, though, this is always considered a bug.
• There are currently no recursion limits on callbacks. This could cause one of two problems, either the API will run out of stack space and cause a panic in Rust, or more likely it will cause an internal LUA_USE_APICHECK abort, from exceeding LUAI_MAXCCALLS. This may be a source of unsafety if LUA_USE_APICHECK is disabled, and is considered a bug.
• All callbacks in rlua are FnMut, so if you trigger your own callback recursively, currently this will panic.
• There are currently no checks on argument sizes, and I think you may be able to cause an abort by providing a large enough rlua::Variadic. I believe this would be unsafe without LUA_USE_APICHECK and should be considered a bug.