Multi Tasking

wiki

• Cooperative:
  • Standard Lua coroutines [2] - lightweight cooperative multitasking
  • [Coco] (5.1) - true C coroutines for Lua (yield from anywhere)
  • [tuna] (5.1/5.2) - cooperative C-level scheduler, in some ways like Coco. High memory efficiency. Win32 (Win64 soon) and Linux x86/64
  • [Copas] (5.1) - a dispatcher based on coroutines and LuaSocket? that can be used by request/response servers.
  • [LuaEvent] (5.1) - a binding to libevent, offers a coroutine dispatcher a-la Copas.
  • [lua-ev] (5.1) - a binding to libev, still young.
• Preemptive, shared state:
  • [LuaThread] (5.0/5.1) - threads share the same Lua state (synchronized); uses native OS threads (preemptive)
• Preemptive, message passing:
  • [zmq.threads] - The [ZeroMQ] Lua bindings has a wrapper for [lua-llthreads] to add message passing support to lua-llthreads.
  • [LuaLanes] (5.1) - completely separate Lua states, one per thread, with asynchronous message passing
  • [LuaTask] (5.1) - multiple concurrent, independent Lua states, one per thread, with message passing
• Preemptive
  • [lua-llthreads] - provides a very simple interface to pthreads. Each thread has an independent Lua state.
  • [Lua/APR multithreading] - multiple concurrent, independent Lua states, one per OS thread. Uses Apache APR.
• Cooperative, message passing:
  • [ConcurrentLua] (5.1) - implements Erlang-style concurrency for Lua ("share-nothing asynchronous message-passing model" implemented with coroutines extended with message-passing primitives and also supporting distributed programming)
  • [luaproc] - for details, see: [Exploring Lua for Concurrent Programming] by Alexandre Skyrme, Noemi Rodriguez, and Roberto Ierusalimschy. [2008]
• Threading only on the C side:
  • [Helper Threads Toolkit] - multitheading tasks only spawned on the C side
  • [Occasional threading] - similar to Helper Threads Toolkit
• Other:
  • [Rings] - provides a way to create multiple communicating Lua states (doesn't in itself provide multithreading)
  • [SMC] (5.?) - the State Machine Compiler, makes custom [FSM]-based dispatchers for Lua (among many other languages).
  • [Miros] (5.1) - a Lua module that implements a Hierarchical State Machine ([HSM]) class (i.e. one that implements behavioral inheritance).
  • [LuaGravity] - roughly based on Esterel and FrTime?, two synchronous reactive languages.
  • [lua-zmq] - a binding to ZeroMQ[3], the high-performance message queue library with a socket-style API.

A comparison of a number of Lua multithreading libraries is in [Lanes].