I had trouble trying to figure out luasocket from its documentation without resorting to digging through the source. I understand that certain choices were made to unify the differences between how Linux and Windows error (as they use different constant names and values), but I found it frustrating figuring out what things like :receive() might return. Maybe I'm just bad at navigating the docs, but I could not find a list of possible return values (the error names to compare against). :(
My reasoning for trying to match C structs is that there are a plethora of C networking tutorials and man pages detailing what to expect so it makes it very easy for others to figure out what values are in the table under what key names -- even if the table seems a bit wonky with how to how one would represent that data in Lua. There are less Lua networking tutorials...
Your getaddrinfo() does look much nicer :] I just couldn't decide on how to make it friendly -- how I would return a table showing which sock types and protocols the remote host supports. Maybe people only really use getaddrinfo() to resolve domain names as they already know they want to establish a TCP connection. My other reasoning was that because my bindings are pretty direct, it still leaves the option of layering over it a friendlier interface while not keeping things like getaddrinfo() from the user.
With luasocket, I found a lot of the time I needed to break user-friendly abstractions. Especially if I wanted to use something other than select() or a library expecting a socket:getfd(). I also found the number of socket options you can toggle/set a bit limited, though I understand the portability behind which options made it in.
