Multi Tasking

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• 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.
  • [luasched] (5.1) - collaborative multithreading, shared memory
  • [Lumen] (5.1/5.2/LuaJIT) - pure-lua collaborative multithreading, shared memory, inspired in luasched.
• 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.
  • [Lanes] (5.1/5.2) - 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
  • [mqlua] (5.1/5.2) - MqLua - Run multiple Lua states in POSIX threads and use ZeroMQ for communication.
• Preemptive
  • [lua-llthreads] - provides a very simple interface to pthreads. Each thread has an independent Lua state.
  • [lua-llthreads2] - drop-in replacement for [lua-llthreads] library with several additional functionality.
  • [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). See [Concurrency Oriented Programming in Lua] (M.S. thesis by Eleftherios Chatzimparmpas, 2007).
  • [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.
  • [luaproxy] - spawn and access separate Lua states from within Lua.

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