stetre / moonagents

Reactive state machines in Lua

MoonAgents: Reactive state machines in Lua

MoonAgents is a Lua module for event-driven concurrent programming.

It is designed after the concurrency model of the ITU-T Specification and Description Language (SDL) and provides functions for the implementation of systems composed of concurrent, reactive and intercommunicating finite state machines ('agents').

MoonAgents runs on GNU/Linux and on Windows (MSYS2/MinGW) and requires Lua (>=5.3).

Author: Stefano Trettel

(Note: MoonAgents is derived from LunaSDL, which it supersedes, and which is now discontinued. The major differences with LunaSDL are listed in the design notes document.)

License

MIT/X11 license (same as Lua). See LICENSE.

Documentation

See the Reference Manual.

Getting and installing

Setup the build environment as described here, then:

$ git clone https://github.com/stetre/moonagents
$ cd moonagents
moonagents$ make
moonagents$ sudo make install

Examples

The example below creates an agent that gives the traditional salute with a little delay (using a timer) and then stops.

Other examples can be found in the examples/ directory of this repo.

-- Hello World application - hello.lua

local moonagents = require("moonagents")

-- Create the system agent, from the script 'agent.lua':
local system = moonagents.create_system("HelloSystem","agent")

-- Enter the event loop:
while moonagents.trigger() do end

-- Agent script - agent.lua

local delay = 1.2 -- seconds
local T = moonagents.timer(delay,"T_EXPIRED")

local function Start()
   print("Please, wait "..delay.." seconds ...")
   moonagents.timer_start(T)
   moonagents.next_state("Waiting")
end

local function TExpired()
   print("... Hello World!")
   moonagents.stop()
end

moonagents.start_transition(Start)
moonagents.transition("Waiting", "T_EXPIRED", TExpired)

The script can be executed at the shell prompt with the standard Lua interpreter:

$ lua hello.lua

See the examples/ directory.

See also

• MoonLibs - Graphics and Audio Lua Libraries.