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Comment by matt_m | Hacker News Reader

I've been using this lately on a personal project.

For those who don't know, this is basically a clone of the Node.js API in the Lua language (using the LuaJIT compiler). This is interesting because:

- LuaJIT is often faster than V8 and uses less memory

- LuaJIT has a built in C FFI and supports C datatypes for working with low level libraries (or even writing low level code in Lua)

- Lua has coroutines

I think this is already being used in production at Rackspace, mainly because of the lower memory usage.

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I think Rackspace is using openresty.

http://openresty.org/

Rackspace use hundreds of open source projects.

Luvit.io is specifically being used in our Host Monitoring Agent, which is open source and you can find here:

https://github.com/racker/virgo

This is used to collect all kinds of host metrics (CPU, disk, ram, custom scripts, mysql, etc) for the Cloud Monitoring Product.

also:

- Lua (as a language) is for the most part better designed than JavaScript

Link to the project? I always like to see examples.

Blogging about your experience using it would probably get you some decent traffic, too.

I suspect the project he's referring to is our monitoring agent: https://github.com/racker/virgo

We're working on splitting this out into a reusable platform for writing lightweight host-based agents. Luvit works out fairly well for this - our monitoring agent runs in around 5mb resident memory, works on Windows (although we haven't released that yet) and is relatively easy to code on.

Shameless plug: if this sort of stuff interests you, hit me up, my email is in my profile.

I was referring to the "personal project" matt_m mentioned, but I'll take a closer look at this too.

Looks interesting. If I may ask, what inspired using luvit for this project in the first place?

We use Node.js on our backend, were involved in some of the work that led to libuv being split out from node core, and were already planning to use Lua based on our experience with the Cloudkick agent. All told, when we saw what Tim was doing with luvit it seemed like a natural fit.

Thanks. If lua and node are already part of your workflow, it makes sense to build on that. Looks like a lot of fun!

I haven't released it yet, maybe I'll do a Show HN in the future!

That would be cool. Please do!

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