What makes languages like Python so great is the stdlib that goes with them -- I hope that projects like this can help grow Lua into a more mainstream language.
Lua Rocks is quite interesting. A lot of the ground work that was done for server-side JavaScript after Node became popular already exists, as do many modules. So you "just" need to add more, not invent something spanking new.
Never mind that I don't think this will make huge inroads. The big thing about NodeJS is that it's JavaScript, so that some frontend coder could use his already existing knowledge to quickly make a high-performing web service. And it came out with just enough hype to make it popular and create a community.
Lua doesn't really have those advantages. I do like the language a lot better than the mess that's JavaScript, but if a bunch of young coders are looking at a tool to fill a gap in their tech stack, it's not that likely that they'll look for Lua, unless they're all WoW extension programmers…
As I wrote above, I like it a lot, too. It's a very simple, clean language without any silly flourishes, a good implementation and easily added to most projects.
But in your average web shop, the chances of finding someone who has already worked with it is pretty low, whereas JavaScript itself runs at about 100%. And I firmly believe that this is the biggest reason for the popularity of NodeJS. Not the concept (cf. eventlet, EventMachine, POE etc.), but the fact that you've been offered a simple package where you don't have to learn anything really new.
Still, I'm grateful for an extended toolkit myself, and I'm looking forward to what people can do with coroutines and tables to make the programming experience more pleasant.
Maybe this could leverage the Lua/APR binding to get a starting stdlib?. Modules like xml, crypto, base64 and memcached would round it up nicely, not sure about the IO and threading ones, perhaps those are redundant to luvit.
