><i>No matter what I did, someone was going to load an existing blocking Lua library in and ruin it. </i><p>I don't think this is the case, the most popular library for networking in Lua has been COPAS, which does nonblocking by using coroutines. And even the canonical guide to Lua, PiL <a href="http://www.lua.org/pil/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lua.org/pil/</a>, also has a chapter on using coroutines with LuaSocket to download multiple files asynchronously at the same time. Most complaints of Lua are about having <i>too</i> few libraries, so it's interesting to see an argument claiming it has too many.<p>If anyone is interested in a nonblocking networking library that uses <i>callbacks</i> (similar to node.JS) instead of coroutines for Lua and LuaJIT, I've started such a project here: <a href="https://github.com/davidhollander/ox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davidhollander/ox</a>