Lua is a small, portable, and fast scripting language designed for embedding in other software. Being designed for embedding, it has a simple but powerful API which makes it easy to communicate both ways: from C into Lua and from Lua into C. In this post, I’ll describe the process of writing a small module adding support for OpenSSL’s hashing functions to Lua.

Hashing data with OpenSSL

Generating hashes of data is an relatively simple problem to address in a library: is has a small, simple interface which can be implemented using any of a large number of hashing libraries. Rather than locate, evaluate and include one of the many open source or public domain hashing libraries, I’ve decided to wrap the hashing functions from OpenSSL. This provides a number of benefits:

It’s reasonably well trusted (and I don’t have to try to vet it). It’s installed pretty much everywhere (so I don’t need to include it with my code). It’s API is simple, consistent, and flexible. We’ll see later that it makes my code powerful and lends it an elegant interface.

Before I can write a Lua wrapper for the OpenSSL functions, I’ll need to know how they work. The man pages help immeasurably, especially as they contain code demonstrating how to hash data using OpenSSL. Following the example in that man page, a first cut of my code will look like this:

Easy! Variable arguments are a pain in the arse in C, so I’ve omitted them from the code above but it’d be great if the Lua module will accept any number of input values and hash them all. Thanks to the great OpenSSL API, doing so is just a matter of calling EVP_DigestUpdate() in a loop over each of the input values. It couldn’t be simpler!

Calling C code from Lua

Now that I can hash values with the OpenSSL functions, it’s time to think about calling that code from Lua. Lua has a fairly simple API for implementing module in C:

functions take a single argument – the state of the Lua interpreter

they can manipulate that state, including pushing or poping values off the argument stack

and then return an integer – the number of items they push onto the stack as return values.

As simple example may help illustrate. The following function inspects the stack to see how many parameters it was invoked with, and returns a message state such. Unlike the stacks used in many other systems, the Lua stack is indexed (you can access any item by its index, rather than only the top item) and these indexes start from 1 (instead of the traditional 0). As a consequence, the index of the top of the stack is the number of items on it.

Using just few more functions from the API, I can modify the OpenSSL code above to be called from Lua. All it requires is a change of signature, a call to lua_tolstring() to get the algorithm name, a call to lua_gettop() to get the number of inputs, a loop calling lua_tolstring() to get each of them in turn and feed them to the hashing code, and a call to lua_pushstring() to push the return value onto the stack.

The revised code looks like this:

With the function itself written, registering it so that it can be called by Lua code is simple too. Each C module (whether compiled into Lua or loaded as a shared object library) has a luaopen_*() function that is responsible for initialising the library and registering the resources it provides. There are utility functions to automatically register entire modules based on arrays of function pointers, but I’ve only got one function and there’s no point cramming it into a table, so I’ll go it alone. Again, it’s really easy:

An elegant API

This is all very well and good, but the API is pretty poor as it stands: a single function which takes a string (denoting the actual function to compute) and a bunch of inputs. It’s pretty cool that we can support all these functions with a single piece of code, but it’d be even better if our single piece of code implementing many functions looked like the many functions to the callers. Rather than hash("md5", v1, v2, v3) , we should be writing md5(v1,v2,v3) . Happily, this too is a cinch!

Tables and meta-tables

You may or may not be familiar with tables – Lua’s single complex data-structure. Tables are a combination of arrays (sequential, integer indexed, etc.) with dictionaries/hashes (matching arbitrary keys with a value). Lua uses tables for pretty much everything including environments (wherein variables are stored) and modules (like our library).

If that was all there was to tables, then they wouldn’t be such a big thing. Thankfully it is not. In addition to their workaday nature as Lua’s catch all storage thingy, the semantics of tables can be modified using meta-tables full of functions which implement aspects of their table’s semantics. Using meta-tables I can override the default behaviour of, say, looking up a value my module table and return a brand new object instead. An object that didn’t even exist until you asked for it.

Using this facility along with closures and anonymous functions I can hide my hash_hash() function above in a meta-table. It’s as simple as modifying hash_hash() to take the algorithm name from its closure (rather than the first parameter) and adding a new wrapper function to create these closures on request. It is this wrapper function that will go in the meta-table to give us a shiny new API.

Creating the closure

The first task is to create a closure of hash_hash() along with the algorithm name. Bearing in mind that this function is going to be called as the index operation, it will need to take two parameters: the table and the key. Given that it’ll only be called for my module table, I’ll just ignore the table argument.

This code just reads the key from the stack as a string and pushes it back onto the stack (this may not be necessary, I’m not sure). Then it pushes a closure of this one value with hash_hash() onto the stack.

Modifying hash_hash() to use this closure value is just as ease. I just need to modify the lua_tostring() call that gets the algorithm name to get the first value from the closure instead of the first argument on the stack:

and modify the for loop to start at first argument instead of the second:

Now I’m ready to build and install the meta-table for my module and my powerful new API will be complete.

Hiding behind a meta-table

Binding this all up as an API is a little involved. As everything needs to pass through the stack, it’s easiest to create the various objects in order and avoid having to shuffle them around. In code order:

Create the module table; Create the meta-table; Add a reference to hash_index() in the meta-table; Join the table and the meta-table; and Assign the table to the global variable “hash”.

This isn’t much longer in code. The body of luaopen_hash() now looks like:

A few notes might help make the above a little clearer. The stack can be accessed with negative indices which count from the top rather than the bottom (i.e. -1 is the top, -2 is second from the top, etc.) and there are a number of magical indices that access such things as the globals table (like LUA_GLOBALSINDEX ).

With these changes made, my code now has an API that’s actually pretty great: a single table that, by the magic of meta-tables, looks-up the appropriate function as requested by the caller. It exposes a lot of functionality (six different functions on my machine) but is implemented which only a fraction of the code a traditional approach would need (about a sixth of it).

“Where do we go from here?”

The code I’ve described in this post is very simple but provides a powerful, elegant interface that belies that simplicity.

The complete code for the module developed in this article is available as lhash.c. Note, though, that I make no warranty as to its correctness or its fitness or suitability for any purpose.

Useful though it is, there are many ways it could be improved. Perhaps the most important is improved error handling. As it stands, my code delays error detection and handling ’til the latest possible moment: right as it’s about to perform the hashing operation. It’s entirely reasonable (given Lua’s first class functions) that a user might get a reference to a hash function and not call it until much later in the program. It would be nice if, instead of happily returning a closure, code like

would fail immediately, rather than waiting until the program tries to call f . To make it so, I need only to make to the code is to copy and paste the algorithm lookup and test and – for good measure – move the OpenSSL initialization call into the library open function. See the revised lhash2.c for these changes. To make this even more useful, I’d like to find out how to set the function name in the call stack without registering it (and thus allowing the users to call it directly).

It’s also not particularly self-documenting. Tables in Lua are iterable just like similar structures in other languages. It’d be nice if callers could iterate over the table and get a list of the valid keys, just as they can with most other modules.

While generating a new closure every time the user wants one is cheap, it would be nice to add memoization so that hash_index() doesn’t need to create a new closure if it’s already created one for the requested algorithm. This would also ensure that references to the same hash algorithm are identical which is not currently the case (alas hash.md5 != hash.md5 ).

Finally, allowing the user to hash values other than strings and numbers. Alas, this would be rather more complex what with having to serialize tables for hashing (a difficult task without a stable sort and in the possible presence of arbitrary opaque values from other C extensions).

When that lot’s done, it’ll be time to move on to the rest of OpenSSL…