Question

How do you end a long running Lua script?

I have two threads, one runs the main program and the other controls a user supplied Lua script. I need to kill the thread that’s running Lua, but first I need the script to exit.

Is there a way to force a script to exit?

I have read that the suggested approach is to return a Lua exception. However, it’s not garanteed that the user’s script will ever call an api function ( it could be in a tight busy loop). Further, the user could prevent errors from causing his script to exit by using a pcall.

Answer 1

You could use setjmp and longjump, just like the Lua library does internally. That will get you out of pcalls and stuff just fine without need to continuously error, preventing the script from attempting to handle your bogus errors and still getting you out of execution. (I have no idea how well this plays with threads though.)

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

jmp_buf place;

void hook(lua_State* L, lua_Debug *ar)
{
    static int countdown = 10;
    if (countdown > 0)
    {
        --countdown;
        printf("countdown: %d!\n", countdown);
    }
    else
    {
        longjmp(place, 1);
    }
}

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
    lua_State* L = luaL_newstate();
    luaL_openlibs(L);
    lua_sethook(L, hook, LUA_MASKCOUNT, 100);

    if (setjmp(place) == 0)
        luaL_dostring(L, "function test() pcall(test) print 'recursing' end pcall(test)");

    lua_close(L);
    printf("Done!");
    return 0;
}