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sctb
motor
Lua2015–2022
sctb / motor

motor

An event-based IO library for Lumen

4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An event-based IO library for Lumen

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:02:44 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-10-16 03:04:02 UTC to 2022-10-13 18:46:31 UTC.

0122015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
>> What about host language access? I'd rather not give up using existing JS and Lua libraries. >Easy: $ npm i leftpad $ LUMEN_HOST=node lumen > (require 'leftpad) function > ((require 'leftpad) "foo" 10) "0000000foo" Huh. It just worked. With rlwrap this feels (at least at the very first try) regular REPL! >> I can see there's REPL, but is it possible to have dynamic evaluation while running inside web browser? > Yes, the entire codebase is only 3k lines. You can use browserify, or simply concatenate all the JS files together. Lumen is unopinionated. Amazing. That sounds very compact to me. I'd imagine today's JS build systems can do optimized builds without too much trouble. Also, by that count it should be an afternoon's read to get it. > I've done this before, and I'm more than happy to set you up with a copy-pastable sol
Read the rest
ution if you want. My answer in your other comment. >> Have you used this inside Nginx's Lua module and/or OpenResty? > No, but there's no reason it wouldn't work. Here's an example of it working in a WASM Lua implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13900453 Ok, must do some testing. I have nothing against Lua, but having a Lisp within Nginx/OpenResty just seems more fun. >> Why not Python as one target host language? Lists and hashmaps (dictionaries) are pretty prevalent there and I believe continuously developed Lisp dialect is still missing. > I've spent time on this! It's a difficult problem. In Lua and JS, you can attach keys and values to arrays. In other words, an array can also be a hashmap. Not so in Python -- or rather, not with the standard Python dict() type. And then you run into problems of interoperability and performance: if it's a non-standard type, other libraries run into problems consuming it. This is less true of Python than other languages, though, so I've been trying to find a happy medium. > There are ways of using solely arrays, but it involves having some sort of Keyword type. A normal lisp has those, and typically they use '(a b :x 42) to create an "array" where the first two elements are "a" and "b" and the key "x" has value 42. You can do something similar for Python, and it's an active area of research for me. Yeah, I realize there's all sorts of pitfalls. I thought about 3.6 having by default ordered dicts could make things easier. But probably not. Perhaps if I'd do array indexed access in Python with a helper method "transpiled" where necessary. In my own code I could keep from using other, harder to support Pythonisms. >> Any example apps or sample code anywhere? > This is Lumen's strength and weakness. Very few people know about Lumen because of a lack of examples and documentation. However, it's incredibly cool and quite mysterious, and I like that it has a very small following. It makes changing the language much easier. > Here's an extensive example: https://github.com/sctb/motor > Note that it won't run on the latest Lumen, because dot syntax was recently removed. You'll need to revert to commit `c146de`. But you see how easy it is to morph the language into whatever shape you want, and how powerful it can be. I'll check it out, thank you. And thank you for this!
In The Common Lisp Cookbook
> What about host language access? I'd rather not give up using existing JS and Lua libraries. Easy: $ npm i leftpad $ LUMEN_HOST=node lumen > (require 'leftpad) function > ((require 'leftpad) "foo" 10) "0000000foo" > I can see there's REPL, but is it possible to have dynamic evaluation while running inside web browser? Yes, the entire codebase is only 3k lines. You can use browserify, or simply concatenate all the JS files together. Lumen is unopinionated. I've done this before, and I'm more than happy to set you up with a copy-pastable solution if you want. > Have you used this inside Nginx's Lua module and/or OpenResty? No, but there's no reason it wouldn't work. Here's an example of it working in a WASM Lua implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13900453 > Why not Python as one target host language? Lists an
Read the rest
d hashmaps (dictionaries) are pretty prevalent there and I believe continuously developed Lisp dialect is still missing. I've spent time on this! It's a difficult problem. In Lua and JS, you can attach keys and values to arrays. In other words, an array can also be a hashmap. Not so in Python -- or rather, not with the standard Python dict() type. And then you run into problems of interoperability and performance: if it's a non-standard type, other libraries run into problems consuming it. This is less true of Python than other languages, though, so I've been trying to find a happy medium. There are ways of using solely arrays, but it involves having some sort of Keyword type. A normal lisp has those, and typically they use '(a b :x 42) to create an "array" where the first two elements are "a" and "b" and the key "x" has value 42. You can do something similar for Python, and it's an active area of research for me. > Any example apps or sample code anywhere? This is Lumen's strength and weakness. Very few people know about Lumen because of a lack of examples and documentation. However, it's incredibly cool and quite mysterious, and I like that it has a very small following. It makes changing the language much easier. Here's an extensive example: https://github.com/sctb/motor Note that it won't run on the latest Lumen, because dot syntax was recently removed. You'll need to revert to commit `c146de`. But you see how easy it is to morph the language into whatever shape you want, and how powerful it can be.
In The Common Lisp Cookbook

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