Lua Coroutines

Introduction

Coroutines in Lua provide cooperative multitasking, enabling functions to suspend and resume execution. Unlike threads, coroutines don't run in parallel but yield control explicitly, making them simpler to reason about while enabling powerful asynchronous patterns without callback complexity.

Coroutines are first-class values in Lua, created from functions and managed through the coroutine library. They maintain their own stack, local variables, and instruction pointer, allowing suspension at any point and resumption later. This enables elegant implementations of generators, iterators, and state machines.

This skill covers coroutine basics, yielding and resuming with values, generators and iterators, producer-consumer patterns, asynchronous I/O simulation, state machines, error handling, and practical coroutine patterns.

Coroutine Fundamentals