I've been playing around with node.js (nodejs) for the past few day and it is fantastic. As far as I can tell, lua doesn't have a similar integration of libev and libio which let's one avoid almost any blocking calls and interact with the network and the filesystem in an asynchronous manner.
I'm slowly porting my java implementation to nodejs, but I'm shocked that luajit is much faster than v8 JavaScript AND uses far less memory!
I imagine writing my server in such an environment (very fast and responsive, very low memory usage, very expressive) will improve my project immensly.
Being new to lua, I'm just not sure if such a thing exists. I'll appreciate any pointers.
Thanks
Answer
A recent corresponding project is Luvit "(Lua + libUV + jIT = pure awesomesauce)".
From the announcement:
this is basically luajit2 + libuv (the event loop library behind nodejs). It compiles as a single executable just like nodejs and can run .lua files. What makes it different from the stock luajit distribution is it has several built-in modules added and some slightly different semantics.
Notice that we're not running as a CGI script to apache or anything like that. The lua script is the http server. You get your callback called every time an http request is made to the server.