A first example

We begin with metaprogramming in terra by reproducing the C example from the introduction:

Compared to the C version we observe that MSG is not a macro but a valid lua variable. The same applies to the C wrapper imported with terralib.includec. As we will see later, it is stored as a lua table! Function calls from stdio.h inside the main function are then simple index operations on this table. Note that in the last line of our example we explicitly call main. In contrast to C, where the function main is always executed, terra does not run a compiled function by default.