Lua sockets - Asynchronous Events

Question

In current lua sockets implementation, I see that we have to install a timer that calls back periodically so that we check in a non blocking API to see if we have received a

Answer 1

I use lua-ev https://github.com/brimworks/lua-ev for all IO-multiplexing stuff. It is very easy to use fits into Lua (and its function) like a charm. It is either select/poll/epoll or kqueue based and performs very good too.

 local ev = require'ev'
 local loop = ev.Loop.default
 local udp_sock -- your udp socket instance
 udp_sock:settimeout(0) -- make non blocking
 local udp_receive_io = ev.IO.new(function(io,loop)
       local chunk,err = udp_sock:receive(4096)
       if chunk and not err then
           -- process data
       end
    end,udp_sock:getfd(),ev.READ)

 udp_receive_io:start(loop) 
 loop:loop() -- blocks forever

In my opinion Lua+luasocket+lua-ev is just a dream team for building efficient and robust networking applications (for embedded devices/environments). There are more powerful tools out there! But if your resources are limited, Lua is a good choice!