But doesn't LuaInterface does that automatically?
No. You can see for yourself via:
for k,v in pairs(getmetatable(v1)) do
print(k,v)
end
You'll see no __add
metamethod.
if not, how could I automate this myself?
You'd have to modify the LuaInterface source to look for the operator+
method and add the __add
metamethod. It simply doesn't do that now.
Given that you have the type proxy available (because you imported the type via import_type
), you can access operator+, which is a static method on the type.
local v3 = Vector2.op_Addition(v1,v2)
To say v1 + v2
you'd need to modify the metamethod used by Vector2 object instance, but this requires creating an instance of the type:
local v1 = Vector2(1,1)
getmetatable(v1).__add = function(a,b) return Vector2.op_Addition(a,b) end
This affects the metamethod used by all instance, so you only need to do it once. Now you can write:
local v2 = Vector2(2,2)
local v3 = v1 + v2
Because you need an object to edit its metamethod, it would be hard to make this cleaner. If you modify your C# code to make sure that your class has a default constructor (i.e. no parameters), you could create a wrapper for import_type
that does this:
function luanet.import_type_ex(typename)
local T = luanet.import_type(typename)
local mt = getmetatable(T())
local function gethandler(name) return T[name] end
local function addmethod(metamethodName, handlerName)
local foundHandler, handler = pcall(gethandler, handlerName)
if foundHandler then mt[metamethodName] = handler end
end
addmethod('__add', 'op_Addition')
addmethod('__sub', 'op_Subtraction')
addmethod('__mul', 'op_Multiply')
addmethod('__div', 'op_Division')
return T
end
You could extend that for other operators. Note that LuaInterface throws an exception if you try to access a member that doesn't exist (rather than returning nil
), so we have to wrap the attempt to access a handler with pcall
.
With that in place you could write:
Vector2 = luanet.import_type_ex('YourNamespace.Vector2')
local v1 = Vector2(10)
local v2 = Vector2(20)
local v3 = v1 + v2
Of course, this would work for other types that have overloaded operators.
LuaInterface is a bit of a hot mess. There are a few projects in the Lua world like it, where somebody at PUC-Rio does it as a research project, publishes a paper, then abandons it. They did it to see if they could, not because they actually use it.