Re: Is Lua the next big thing?

[Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 06:31:45PM -0800, Lothar Scholz wrote:
> For threading the answer is simple and not satisfying: There is no
> really usefull scripting language yet. Python supports it a little bit,
> Ruby not at all, Perl is using a fork like modell and TCL is going the
> LUA way of complete isolated threads.

Thats a pretty good summary, but alone among the Python/Ruby/Perl/Lua,
Lua allows itself to be compiled with thread-aware locking, LuaThread
uses this capability.

Does anybody know what the granularity of this locking is? Even though
its a feature only lua has, there is almost no published information I
can find about it! What is the performance of LuaThread? Can it be used
profitably on a multi-core machine, for example, to get higher cpu usage?

Or, if you want to spin off worker threads to do file i/o operations,
but have all your network i/o running with select-driven coroutines, is
the locking of such granularity that LuaThread is a reasonable tool?

Cheers,
Sam