Emilua

A cross-platform execution engine for LuaJIT with support for async IO and flexible threading layout.

Execution engine

Emilua strives to be the most complete execution engine for Lua. Whether you want single-VM concurrency support to exploit complex async IO interactions or multi-VM support to exploit possible parallelism your needs should be covered.

Fibers

Avoid the callback-hell syndrome, and enjoy tried-and-true sync primitives when you opt for shared-memory concurrency. Emilua offers a complete fiber API (bonus: you don’t need to migrate to Lua 5.4 to enjoy to-be-closed specifier benefits — use cleanup handlers directly from LuaJIT instead).

Cross-platform

Emilua is powered by the battle-tested and scar-accumulating Boost.Asio library to drive IO and it’ll make use of native APIs in a long list of supported platforms. Moreover processor ISA compatibility will be limited by LuaJIT availability.

Network IO

  • TCP.

  • UDP.

  • TLS.

  • Address/service forward/reverse name resolution.

  • IPv6 support (and mostly transparent).

  • Cancellable operations transparently integrated into the fiber interruption API.

  • Several generic algorithms.

  • Experimental HTTP and WebSocket support. In later releases they should be split into their own plugin so they can evolve and follow their own release schedules without impacting core Emilua.

IPC

  • UNIX domain sockets (stream, datagram, and seqpacket).

  • SCM_RIGHTS fd-passing.

  • Pipes.

  • UNIX signals.

  • Ctty job control (and basic pty support).

Filesystem API

  • It easily abstracts path manipulation for different platforms (e.g. POSIX & Windows).

  • Transparently translates to UTF-8 while retaining the native representation for the underlying system under the hood.

  • Directory iterators (flat and recursive).

  • APIs to query attributes, manipulate permissions, and the like.

  • Lots of algorithms (e.g. symlink-resolving path canonization, subtrees copying, etc).

  • It focuses on cross-platform support, so not all operations are supported yet, but some platform-specific extensions are already available (e.g. non-Windows umask(3p)).

Misc features

  • Complete fiber API (sync primitives, interruption API, clean-up handlers, fiber local storage, assert-like scheduling constraints, …​).

  • Integrates with Lua builtins (i.e. you can mix up fibers and coroutines, modules, …​).

  • AWK-inspired scanner to parse textual streams easily.

  • Clocks & timers.

  • File IO (for proactors only[1], so the main thread never blocks).

  • Serial ports.

  • A basic regex module.

  • Native JSON module.

  • Portable error code comparison.

  • Powerful interface to interact with Linux namespaces.

  • And much more.

1. Right now, Windows' IOCP, and Linux’s io_uring.