Re: Best way to exploit multicores with lua?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Rob Kendrick <rjek@rjek.com> wrote:
> Lua Lanes seems good, but I've only used it briefly.  My contribution to
> the language shootout for Mandlebrot uses popen(), but I suspect that
> might make your eyes bleed.

There is a good comparison of the options by the author of Lanes:

http://kotisivu.dnainternet.net/askok/bin/lanes/comparison.html

A summary:  true multitasking cannot be done with the same Lua state.
However, separate Lua states inhabit their own universes, so either
serialize (exchange Lua data as a string) or do state-to-state
copying.

I know built-in multithreading (like with LuaThreads) seems like an
attractive option, but likely to hit the same performance wall as
Python threads:

http://www.dabeaz.com/python/GIL.pdf

(in summary, does not scale up with cores, really only useful for blocking i/o)

steve d.