NovaSharp — GitHub Repository

Overview

This project is a port of MoonSharp. MoonSharp has not had a commit in over 4 years, and its last stable release was over 9 years ago. It would be awesome to have an active, maintained version of this project.

Project Goals

• Active maintenance
• Ease of understanding: add significant documentation, making onboarding trivial
• Modernize the stack. Remove support for old .Net versions, commonalize on .Net Standard 2.1
• Target Lua 5.4.8 semantics (see docs/LuaCompatibility.md for tracked gaps)
• Fix all outstanding bugs
• Significantly increase performance
• Unity/Mono/IL2CPP-first

Installation

NuGet (.NET):

dotnet add package WallstopStudios.NovaSharp.Interpreter

Unity Package Manager: See docs/UnityIntegration.md for detailed instructions, or add the package from disk using scripts/packaging/build-unity-package.sh.

AI Warning

In order to accomplish the above, I will be utilizing AI coding assistance. I will do my best to vet the quality of all code and this repo.

Legacy README

A complete Lua solution written entirely in C# for the .NET, Mono, Xamarin and Unity3D platforms.

Features:

• Designed for near-complete compatibility with Lua 5.4.8 (remaining gaps tracked in docs/LuaCompatibility.md)
• Support for metalua style anonymous functions (lambda-style)
• Easy to use API
• Debugger support for Visual Studio Code (PCL targets not supported)
• Remote debugger accessible with a web browser and Flash (PCL targets not supported)
• Targets .NET Standard 2.1 for compatibility with modern .NET (6/7/8), Mono, and Unity 2021+ (including IL2CPP)
• Runs on Ahead-of-time platforms like iOS through IL2CPP
• No external dependencies, implemented in as few targets as possible
• Easy and performant interop with CLR objects, with runtime code generation where supported
• Interop with methods, extension methods, overloads, fields, properties and indexers supported
• Support for the complete Lua standard library with very few exceptions (mostly located on the 'debug' module) and a few extensions (in the string library, mostly)
• Async helpers available on Task-based runtimes
• Supports dumping/loading bytecode for obfuscation and quicker parsing at runtime
• An embedded JSON parser (with no dependencies) to convert between JSON and Lua tables
• Easy opt-out of Lua standard library modules to sandbox what scripts can access
• Easy to use error handling (script errors are exceptions)
• Support for coroutines, including invocation of coroutines as C# iterators
• REPL interpreter, plus facilities to easily implement your own REPL in few lines of code
• Complete XML help, and walkthroughs on https://www.moonsharp.org

For highlights on differences between MoonSharp and standard Lua, see https://www.moonsharp.org/moonluadifferences.html

Please see https://www.moonsharp.org for downloads, infos, tutorials, etc.

Additional documentation:

• Documentation Index
• Contributing Guide
• Performance Benchmarks
• Testing Guide
• Modernization Notes
• Unity Integration
• Helper Scripts Index
• Helper Scripts Index

License

The program and libraries are released under a 3-clause BSD license - see the license section.

Parts of the string library are based on the KopiLua project (https://github.com/NLua/KopiLua). Debugger icons are from the Eclipse project (https://www.eclipse.org/).

Usage

Use of the library is easy as:

double NovaSharpFactorial()
{
	string script = @"    
		-- defines a factorial function
		function fact (n)
			if (n == 0) then
				return 1
			else
				return n*fact(n - 1)
			end
		end

	return fact(5)";

	DynValue res = Script.RunString(script);
	return res.Number;
}

For more in-depth tutorials, samples, etc. please refer to https://www.moonsharp.org/getting_started.html