The library was designed to introduce as little overhead as possible. Most functions were made inline, except those that interact with Lua API directly. In order to isolate the user from Lua API its headers are not used in Lua API++ headers. Functions that interact with Lua API were put into impl.cpp and therefore are not inlined by default. You can change that by using link-time code generation (called LTCG in Visual Studio and LTO in GCC). Alternatively, the LUAPP_HEADER_ONLY macro will make every function inline, but unlike normal mode Lua API headers will be included by lua.hpp as well.

The library relies heavily on templates and aggressive inlining, so without optimization there will be some operational overhead. Use best optimization settings available for your project if you need to achieve best performance.