inspect.lua VS gabe

inspect and strong

I've used inspect.lua to inspect the client table and I can see valid-looking formatCommand settings (using the exact efm folder that u/lukas-reineke uses)

For more complex string matching tasks that the built-in patterns cannot handle, LPeg is a good choice. It's more powerful than regexes while also being easy to use. I also wouldn't expect something like PCRE to ever be included in the Lua standard library. PCRE by itself would already be larger than the rest of the Lua interpreter + standard library.

By the way, for formatting Lua tables I like using inspect[1]. (It's not part of the standard library but oh well, that's the whole topic of today's discussion).

https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua

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.