LuaGObject (sysv86 fork)

LuaGObject dynamically generates Lua bindings to libraries that support GObject-Introspection — GLib, Gio, GTK 4, libadwaita, Pango and many more — plus the Cairo bindings needed by parts of GTK.

This repository is a fork of vtrlx/LuaGObject, maintained for IgnisLua. Upstream remains the canonical project; this fork exists because IgnisLua needs two things that are not upstream yet.

Licensed under an MIT-style license — see LICENSE.

Tested with PUC-Rio Lua 5.1–5.5 and LuaJIT2. Other Lua implementations are not officially supported. The project descends from LGI and shares much of its internals and structure.

What this fork changes

1. Lua 5.5 build support. The core module is built against Lua 5.5 and is loaded by the IgnisLua launcher from deps/install/lib/lua/5.5/LuaGObject/.
2. GC ownership hardening. object_gc used to unref every object a proxy pointed at. For objects Lua never held a reference to — borrowed values and objects already finalized by GTK — that dereferenced stale memory and crashed inside g_type_fundamental(). The fork keeps a registry of objects Lua actually owns and only unrefs those; anything else is left alone.
3. Closure and ParamSpec retention. Signal closures created for Lua callbacks are anchored so a GClosure cannot be freed while the signal is still connected, and GObject.ParamSpec is pre-registered so a pspec arriving from C always has a valid repo table.

Everything else is upstream code. Diff against the vtrlx/LuaGObject master branch to see the fork's changes in full.

Building

GIRepository-2 >= 2.80.0 development files are required (libgirepository-2.0-dev on Debian-based systems, glib2-devel on RedHat-based systems).

GNU Make

make LUA_VERSION=5.5
sudo make install LUA_VERSION=5.5 PREFIX=/usr

On BSD systems use gmake. Plain GNU Make does not detect a system Lua through pkg-config; install PUC-Rio Lua from source if you build this way.

Meson

meson setup build --prefix=/usr -Dlua-pc=... -Dlua-bin=...
ninja -C build
ninja -C build test
sudo ninja -C build install

Visual Studio 2013 and later are supported through Meson as well; see the upstream README for the %INCLUDE%/%LIB%/%PATH% details.

Inside IgnisLua

IgnisLua keeps a prebuilt copy of this fork under deps/install/, which the launcher adds to package.path/package.cpath automatically. To rebuild it in place:

make -C deps/LuaGObject/LuaGObject LUA_VERSION=5.5
cp deps/LuaGObject/LuaGObject/lua_gobject_core.so \
   deps/install/lib/lua/5.5/LuaGObject/lua_gobject_core.so

Usage

local Gtk = require("LuaGObject").require("Gtk", "4.0")
local Gio = require("LuaGObject").require("Gio", "2.0")

local app = Gtk.Application({ application_id = "org.example.App" })

Documentation lives in docs/. Older LGI-era examples are in samples/; some of them, especially the GTK ones, are dated.

Migrating from LGI

Replace require('lgi') with require('LuaGObject'). For build systems and CI pipelines, note that corelgilua51.{so,dll} was renamed to lua_gobject_core.{so,dll}, and all lgi/ paths became LuaGObject/.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests for the fork belong in sysv86/LuaGObject; use the templates in .github/. Do not send fork-only changes upstream — open them against this repository instead.

Upstream vtrlx/LuaGObject has its own contribution policy, including a ban on machine-generated contributions. Anything intended for upstream must satisfy that policy; changes in this fork are not affected by it.

Credits

LuaGObject exists because of Christian Hergert's initial port of LGI to GIRepository 2.80, and because of the LGI developers: Pavel Holejsovsky, Uli Schlachter, Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse, Ildar Mulyukov, Nils Nordman, Ignas Anikevicius, Craig Barnes, Nicola Fontana, Andreas Stührk, Aaron Faanes, Jiří Klimeš, Garrett Regier, Kenneth Zhou, Travis Hoppe, Tobias Jakobs, Heiko Becker, Vincent Bermel and Szunti.

Release history up to 0.10.5 is documented in the upstream README; older pre-fork versions are listed in LGI's history.