luar is designed to make using Lua from Go more convenient. It depends on the luago bindings, originally (here) but uses the fork available from this account, which contains some small improvements and is immediately go-buildable.

The first convenience is that ordinary Go functions may be registered directly:

package main

import "fmt" import "github.com/stevedonovan/luar"

const test = for i = 1,10 do Print(MSG,i) end

func main() { L := luar.Init() defer L.Close()

luar.Register(L,"",luar.Map{
    "Print":fmt.Println,
    "MSG","hello",  // can also register constants
})

L.DoString(test)

}

This is done using Go reflection to marshall values between Lua and Go and back again. (It's still possible to use C-style functions, but for that use RawRegister.)

Some special conversions apply when Lua passes tables to Go functions. If they're 'array-like' they are passed as slices, and if they're 'table-like' they are passed as maps.

Lua will receive Go structs, slices and maps as wrapped userdata. Again reflection is used to look up keys in maps, index slices and fields in structs. Methods are resolved using reflection as well.