dependency on nodejs

[soumith]

Hi,

as you saw, we are thinking of extending "display" a bit more, pimping it out with essential features, and making it a much more polished display backend that we can recommend to everyone in the Torch ecosystem.

On that note, gfx.js, itorch and display suffer from having nodejs/ipython dependency, with quite a few users having trouble installing these.

What are your views on making the json forwarder purely as a lua server?

[szym]

I like the idea. Do you know a good lua package providing lightweight HTTP response building?

[soumith]

luasocket which seems to have become the de-facto socket library used in lua, seems to have a http request/response builders: http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/http.html , and probably is the simplest way forward.

A more fancy overkill will be TurboLua or Async + Waffle

[szym]

I couldn't find http response building in luasocket. It wouldn't be difficult to add. On the other hand, I think Turbo or Async would do.

[szym]

https://github.com/szym/display/commit/ad5769e72a943b64ff7e195c2a4d14a69620e5b0 adds server.lua which is a TurboLua based event forwarder.

There's a bug in TurboLua's recv buffer throttling kernelsauce/turbo#232 but there's an easy workaround (https://github.com/szym/display/commit/488857a3ddb2919b8fee88142b650db377a1c773).

Let me know if that works.

BTW, I've had some issues with installing TurboLua using torch's luarocks because it's Makefile wants to install to /usr/local by default. The workaround there is PREFIX=~/torch/install luarocks install turbo.

[soumith]

thanks. I've tried to install turbo on a variety of systems, and the first FAIL moment I've had (for which I apologize) is that Turbo is Linux Only. That would make it not suitable for a general audience.

I am working right now on a pure luasocket based forwarder, should send a PR in the next couple of hours.

[szym]

Looking at Turbo's Makefile and kernelsauce/turbo#201, it should also support Mac (Darwin), although the rockspec was not yet updated to reflect that. Turbo's only non-Lua code is the HTTP parser :-/

[soumith]

I'm still a bit hesitant on Turbo Lua (considering that I'll be answering random people's questions on the forums about install issues). There's two things that make me hesitate: (1) this statement in the readme: "LuaJIT 2 is REQUIRED, PUC-RIO Lua is unsupported." (2) dependency on libssl (it's been generating quite a few questions on OSX)

[soumith]

As you might have seen in the ROADMAP, we are planning to support LuaJIT as well as Lua51/Lua52, so it goes against what we require.

[soumith]

I made some headway via async (https://github.com/clementfarabet/async) who's only dependency seems to be lua-cjson, and everything is included in it. any hesitation to use that?

[soumith]

If one needs even more minimalism (which I think might be not a bad idea), I'm willing to spend some time to embed lhttp_parser into your repo, and make display have absolutely no external dependencies except luasocket (either C libraries, or lua modules)

[szym]

LuaSocket's http parser is good enough, and we could add a rudimentary http 1.1 writer. Is this what you're up to right now?

[soumith]

indeed. that's exactly what I'm up to at the moment.

[szym]

Great! Waiting for the PR.

[szym]

I took a closer look at clementfarabet/async and it would work (http.listen is all that's needed). Let me know if you want to depend on it. It'd probably need a different name to not be confused with https://luarocks.org/modules/bartbes/async (luarocks.org incorrectly shows that waffle depends on that async).

[szym]

I'll update the rockspec to just place the lua and static files where they need to be.

[szym]

Ok, so this should be all done after clementfarabet/async#22 is merged.