loyso / luacsp

Communicating Sequential Processes in Lua

LuaCSP

Communicating Sequential Processes in Lua: an extension.

LuaCSP library is a framework that allows you to create pseudo-concurrent programming language embeddable in your application.

Read the comprehensive documentation (an article) here.

See the introductional slides here.

Why?

• The world is parallel. Typical simulation and robotics projects deal with many entities acting and interacting concurrently.

• Event-oriented systems (command+callback, finite state machines - FSMs) can be implemented very efficiently but the resulting model logic is quite fragmented, as the scheduling and the evaluation of conditions are scattered throughout the event routines.

• Callbacks and FSMs are way too low-level. FSMs are non-composable.

• Asyncronous "push" multi-threaded systems are hard to program and understand. Whould be nice to orchestrate them at a higher level in synchronous way: back to natural control flow - stack and sequence are very powerful abstractions.

We should resolve these complexity and maintainability issues.

How?

We introduce next level you model in: embeddable Lua-based programming language with concurrent control-flow semantics.

So, LuaCSP:

• Uses the Occam programming language ideas by Tony Hoare (the author of Quicksort).
• Follows the principle of compositionality.
• Introduces restrictions and rules, how entities behave and interact.
• Extends Lua in standard way, includes it as a subset.

LuaCSP can be used under GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Please, contact Alexey Baskakov if you want to use LuaCSP under any other license.

Copyright (c) 2012-2014 Alexey Baskakov. Feel free to contact the author for additional features, consulting and support.

luacsp's Issues

REPL

Is there a chance of a REPL version?