EMILUA(3em)

📦 version 0.12.1, in nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

✨ NAME ✨

Emilua - Lua execution engine — yes bestie, that’s the whole name, and it’s iconic 💅

okay so welcome to EMILUA(3em), the page where we talk about spawning fibers and keeping your concurrency cute and controlled 🎀

🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

spawn(f: function) -> fiber

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So spawn() spawns a new fiber to run f, no cap. It uses post semantics, so the current fiber — the one calling spawn() — keeps running until it reaches a suspension point. That’s the vibe.

Fibers are the primitive of choice to represent concurrency. Every time you need to increase the concurrency level, just spawn a fiber. Simple as that, periodt ✨

Fibers are cooperative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking) and only transfer control to other fibers in well-defined points — sync primitives, IO functions, and any suspending function such as this_fiber.yield(). These points are also used by the cancellation API. iykyk 🦋

No two fibers from the same Lua VM run in parallel — even when the underlying VM’s thread pool has threads available. fr fr, that’s important 💀

Note: spawn() is a global so it doesn’t need to be require()d. main character energy, honestly 👑

🧚 fiber FUNCTIONS 🧚

🌸 join(self) 🌸

Read pthread_join().

Returns the values returned by the fiber’s start function. If that fiber exits with an error, that error is re-raised here (and fiber is considered joined). so real 😭

🦋 detach(self) 🦋

Read pthread_detach().

If the GC collects the fiber handle, it’ll be detached.

💜 cancel(self) 💜

Read pthread_cancel().

🎀 fiber PROPERTIES 🎀

⭐ cancellation_caught: boolean ⭐

Read PTHREAD_CANCELED.

🍓 joinable: boolean 🍓

Whether joinable.

okay bye bestie — this ✨iconic✨ page is serving Emilua 0.12.1-nixpkgs1, dated 1980-01-01 — periodt 💅💖

📦 where this page comes from