Luvit and Lua Bindings for libuv (Changelog Interviews #80)

Wynn caught up with Tim Caswell to talk about Luvit, his new project that provides Lua bindings for libuv.

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Featuring:

• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Adam recently married the lovely Heather.


• Tim Caswell is a long time friend of the show, creator of the How to Node blog.


• Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.


• Luvit = Lua + libUV + jIT = pure awesomesauce.


• LuaJIT’s FFI library allows calling external C functions and using C data structures from pure Lua code.


• Luvit can take advantage of most Node libraries as long as they use non-blocking IO.


• Rackspace is using Luvit in production already, but without HTTP.


• Tim likes the callback style of coding that V8 promotes.


• Wynn asks where Node.js is on the Gartner hype cycle.


• Luvmonkey is a port of libuv bindings for SpiderMonkey.


• Tim fails to see the use case for AMD.


• Tim worked with Jeremy Ashkenas on CoffeeScript while at Document Cloud.


• Candor is a language inspired by javascript, but with less features and, therefore, less complexity. So no semicolons, no exceptions and simplified anonymous function syntax (dart-like).


• Tim has played with Go but likes Rust better.


• Tim is now working at Cloud9 and their cloud-based IDE.


• Surely Tim isn’t “the only JavaScript developer within a hundred miles of” Red Lick, TX.


• Nodebits is another Node.js blog.


• Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis are the “libuv guys” at Cloud9.


• Boot2Gecko is “an early-stage project to expose all device capabilities such that infrastructure like phone dialers can be built with Web APIs.”

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!