LUA compile error with Visual 2010 “external symbol ”struct lua_State * __cdecl luaL_newstate(void)"

Question

I use Lua ver 5.2.3 with visual studio 2010 , when i compile code below

#include "stdafx.h"

#include "lua.h"
#include "lauxlib.h"
#include "lualib.h"
#include <stdlib.h>                          
#include <stdio.h> 

void main()
{
    lua_State *luaState = luaL_newstate();

}

I got error

error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "struct lua_State * __cdecl luaL_newstate(void)" (?luaL_newstate@@YAPAUlua_State@@XZ) referenced in function _wmain

Could you please give me any advice about this . Thank !!!

Answer 1

This is a result of C++ "name mangling". See how there are strange characters in this term:

?luaL_newstate@@YAPAUlua_State@@XZ

You have choices:

Change the file extension of this file to .c instead of .cpp, so that it runs through the C compiler instead of the C++ compiler (caveat: depending on compiler)

or

Add extern "C" around the includes like this:

extern "C"
{
    #include "lua.h"
    #include "lauxlib.h"
    #include "lualib.h"
}

or

#include "lua.hpp"

In the last case, that header is included with the 5.2 release. It does what I wrote in option 2 for you.