The userdata type allows arbitrary C data to be stored in Lua variables. It has no predefined operations in Lua, except assignment and equality test. Userdata are used to represent new types created by an application program or a library written in C; for instance, the standard I/O library uses them to represent files. We will discuss more about userdata later, when we get to the C API.

We will explain the thread type in Chapter 9, where we discuss coroutines.