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Lua Advanced: Metatables, Coroutines, and Powerful Patterns
Lua is simple on the surface, but extremely powerful underneath.
This article explores metatables, metamethods, coroutines, advanced module design, and a set of practical patterns used in games, tools, and embedded systems.
All examples are fully runnable with standard Lua 5.3/5.4.
1. Metatables: Lua’s Custom Behavior Engine
Metatables let you customize how tables behave—similar to operator overloading, custom indexing, inheritance, and more.
1.1 Basic Example: __index Fallback
local defaults = {hp = 100, mp = 50}
local player = {}
setmetatable(player, {
__index = defaults
})
print(player.hp) -- 100
print(player.mp) -- 50
Explanation: