[jaksprats]

in the redis community we have also discussed having a daemon sitting next to the server and doing localhost redis communication. The downsides to doing this are it introduces an extra piece to break. W/ luajit2, which is almost as fast as post-JITted Java, the speed of the scripts are amazingly fast (Salvatore's current method of calling the scripts is dead on, it requires no interpretation, it maps directly to lua_p* calls).

Disclaimer: I wrote AlchemyDB, embedded lua in redis a while back and have played w/ it constantly (it is robust and mind bogglingly flexible).

As for the speed differences of embedded lua vs a daemon sitting next to the server, Alchemy has its test suite in Lua and some tests I run via an external client, and some tests I run internally via embedded Lua. The speed difference between client/daemon and embedded lua becomes VERY evident (10X faster) on large loops, where I/O and TCP kernel time are saved ... but as redis is single threaded server, scripts block the server during their execution, so it is just dangerous for novice programmers.

All in all, if redis embeds lua correctly, it will really open up the project and it is a very minimal bloat, lua is tiny, and it is just one command :)