Lua Lanes -- a new (?) concept for parallel Lua

[Asko Kauppi <askok@...>]

It may be a bit early to throw this in the air (implementation at 0%)  
but I'd want to know if there's any glitches in the design. Throwing  
stones requested, in other words... ;)


Lua Lanes

I've long wanted to have seeming parallelism in Lua, something akin  
to DBUS-kind message passing but made to be syntactically so "sweet"  
it would seem native, transparent, and noncluttered in the code.  
Lately, I crafted a mechanism that would make such calls seem like  
regular function calls, using userdata as handles to the returned  
values.

  f= lane( ...chunk-of-lua-code... )

  a= f( ...args... )	-- starts chunk in a new thread
  b= f( ...other-args... )	-- another thread
  ...
  print( a[1] + b[1] )	-- first use of returned values

Only _using_ the values (any fields of 'a' or 'b') will actually pend  
on their execution to become finished. No locking at the application  
level is required.

What this also allows, is 'a' and 'b' to be passed further (even to  
other threads) as parameters, without requiring their processing to  
have finished, yet.

Is this the way _real_ multithreading should be introduced to Lua?  :)

-asko