threading¶
Lua has no thread safety. sol does not force thread safety bottlenecks anywhere. Treat access and object handling like you were dealing with a raw int
reference (int&
) (no safety or order guarantees whatsoever).
Assume any access or any call on Lua affects the whole sol::state
/lua_State*
(because it does, in a fair bit of cases). Therefore, every call to a state should be blocked off in C++ with some kind of access control (when you’re working with multiple C++ threads). When you start hitting the same state from multiple threads, race conditions (data or instruction) can happen.
Individual Lua coroutines might be able to run on separate C++-created threads without tanking the state utterly, since each Lua coroutine has the capability to run on an independent Lua execution stack (Lua confusingly calls it a thread
in the C API, but it really just means a separate execution stack) as well as some other associated bits and pieces that won’t quite interfere with the global state.
To handle multithreaded environments, it is encouraged to either spawn a Lua state (sol::state
) for each thread you are working with and keep inter-state communication to synchronized serialization points. This means that 3 C++ threads should each have their own Lua state, and access between them should be controlled using some kind of synchronized C++ mechanism (actual transfer between states must be done by serializing the value into C++ and then re-pushing it into the other state).
Using coroutines and Lua’s threads might also buy you some concurrency and parallelism (unconfirmed and likely untrue, do not gamble on this), but remember that Lua’s ‘threading’ technique is ultimately cooperative and requires explicit yielding and resuming (simplified as function calls for sol::coroutine).
getting the main thread¶
Lua 5.1 does not keep a reference to the main thread, therefore the user has to store it themselves. If you create a sol::state
or follow the steps for opening up compatibility and default handlers here, you can work with sol::main_thread
to retrieve you the main thread, given a lua_State*
that is either a full state or a thread: lua_state* Lmain = sol::main_thread( Lcoroutine )
; This function will always work in Lua 5.2 and above: in Lua 5.1, if you do not follow the sol::state
instructions and do not pass a fallback lua_State*
to the function, this function may not work properly and return nullptr
.
working with multiple Lua threads¶
You can mitigate some of the pressure of using coroutines and threading by using the lua_xmove
constructors that sol implements. Simply keep a reference to your sol::state_view
or sol::state
or the target lua_State*
pointer, and pass it into the constructor along with the object you want to copy. Note that there is also some implicit lua_xmove
checks that are done for copy and move assignment operators as well, as noted at the reference constructor explanations.
Note
Advanced used: Furthermore, for every single sol::reference
derived type, there exists a version prefixed with the word main_
, such as sol::main_table
, sol::main_function
, sol::main_object
and similar. These classes, on construction, assignment and other operations, forcibly obtain the lua_State*
associated with the main thread, if possible. Using these classes will allow your code to be immune when a wrapped coroutine or a lua thread is set to nil
and then garbage-collected.
Note
This does not provide immunity from typical multithreading issues in C++, such as synchronized access and the like. Lua’s coroutines are cooperative in nature and concurrent execution with things like std::thread
and similar still need to follow good C++ practices for multi threading.
Here’s an example of explicit state transferring below:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 | #define SOL_CHECK_ARGUMENTS 1
#include <sol.hpp>
#include "../assert.hpp"
#include <iostream>
int main (int, char*[]) {
sol::state lua;
lua.open_libraries();
sol::function transferred_into;
lua["f"] = [&lua, &transferred_into](sol::object t, sol::this_state this_L) {
std::cout << "state of main : " << (void*)lua.lua_state() << std::endl;
std::cout << "state of function : " << (void*)this_L.lua_state() << std::endl;
// pass original lua_State* (or sol::state/sol::state_view)
// transfers ownership from the state of "t",
// to the "lua" sol::state
transferred_into = sol::function(lua, t);
};
lua.script(R"(
i = 0
function test()
co = coroutine.create(
function()
local g = function() i = i + 1 end
f(g)
g = nil
collectgarbage()
end
)
coroutine.resume(co)
co = nil
collectgarbage()
end
)");
// give it a try
lua.safe_script("test()");
// should call 'g' from main thread, increment i by 1
transferred_into();
// check
int i = lua["i"];
c_assert(i == 1);
return 0;
}
|