gabe VS luacheck

I really like baton for input, flux for tweens, and gamera for camera. My projects use gabe as a base for hotloading code changes and it works wonderfully.

Gabe is a class and reloading system that I use with love2d but the class system has a local table of classes instead of putting them in global.

It uses Lua which I find to be more dynamic and expressive than C#, java, or C++. I use gabe to hot load my code so I can change enemy behaviour in code, hit ctrl R, and the enemy starts using the new functions starting from its old state. Tough to set that up with one of those compiled languages!

Second, hot reload actually works and is usually instant. (lume has one you can adapt, I use gabe's class system and reload since it's already integrated). Since an instance of an object is a table, and functions on the object are elements in a table, you can swap out functions for their new values and keep your current state. By comparison, Unity's C# hot code reloading requires you to serialize your state because it needs to unload the AppDomain. It needs to rebuild the world with the new types. Most serialization occurs automatically, but often it doesn't and you need to add special callbacks to make it work. Regardless, for projects of any real size, it's slow. Not sure how Unreal's Live++ (Live Coding) works, but seems like you can't edit .h files.

I prefer the table based approach because it allows hot reloading code for live objects. I use Gabe's classes to create objects and its hotreload code does the rest. Write some enemy code, playtest, find an enemy acting weird, write some debug UI, hotload, see your UI on the broken enemy without having to figure out how to repro. It's like magic.

change code on the fly. Try c# script reloading in unity or Gabe in love2d.

I use gabe because it's integrated into a hot reloading framework.

Luacheck is now maintained by lunarmodules.

I first started by reading some tutorials but most of those used parser combinators. For me, parser combinators always caused some issues sooner or later (at least in Lua when trying to parse recursive / nested nodes). An example project that uses this technique is vim-vsnip: https://github.com/hrsh7th/vim-vsnip/blob/master/autoload/vsnip/snippet/parser.vim. Later, I found out that Luacheck uses a different approach which I liked better: https://github.com/lunarmodules/luacheck/blob/master/src/luacheck/parser.lua. That's the project that helped me the most while writing my own parsers for different snippet engines.

I'm just a contributor to Gabe, but I use luacheck in my other projects. Install it (with hererocks+luarocks on Win and luarocks elsewhere), set it up in your editor, and you'll get warnings about typos and other potential bugs. luacheckrc lets you configure it: turn off warnings you don't care about, customize it for different files.

Use luacheck to find all global and unused variables in your project.

I’m not really really sure what exactly you’re relying on that is so specific to Python, but Lu’s appears to have a static analysis linter. https://github.com/luarocks/luacheck