Luvit is an attempt to do something crazy by taking node.js' awesome architecture and dependencies and seeing how it fits in the Lua language.

This project is still under heavy development, but it's showing promise. In initial benchmarking with a hello world server, this is between 2 and 4 times faster than node.js. Version 0.5.0 is the latest release version.

Do you have a question/want to learn more? Make sure to check out the mailing list and drop by our IRC channel, #luvit on Freenode.

-- Load the http library
local HTTP = require("http")

-- Create a simple nodeJS style hello-world server
HTTP.createServer(function (req, res)
  local body = "Hello World\n"
  res:writeHead(200, {
    ["Content-Type"] = "text/plain",
    ["Content-Length"] = #body
  })
  res:finish(body)
end):listen(8080)

-- Give a friendly message
print("Server listening at http://localhost:8080/")

Luvit contains an extremely useful debug API. Lua contains a stack which is used to manipulate the virtual machine and return values to 'C'. It is often very useful to display this stack to aid in debugging. In fact, this API is accessible via C or from Lua.

require('_debug').stackwalk(errorString)

Displays a backtrace of the current Lua state. Useful when an error happens and you want to get a call stack.

example output:

Lua stack backtrace: error
    in Lua code at luvit/tests/test-crypto.lua:69 fn()
    in Lua code at luvit/lib/luvit/module.lua:67 myloadfile()
    in Lua code at luvit/lib/luvit/luvit.lua:285 (null)()
    in native code
    in Lua code at luvit/lib/luvit/luvit.lua:185 (null)()
    in native code
    in Lua code at [string "    local path = require('uv_native').execpat..."]:1 (null)()

require('_debug').stackdump(string)

luv_lua_debug_stackdump(L, "a message");

Stackdump is extremly useful from within C modules.

require('_debug').debugger()

Supports the following commands:

• quit
• exit
• break
• clear
• clearall
• trace
• bt

The debugger will execute any arbitrary Lua statement by default.