json.lua VS lume

One option might be to look at the Path of Building “Data” folder. If you need them in another format (e.g. json), it wouldn’t be that hard to write a Lua script to export them in your preferred format (using this json library, for example.

If you don't want to reinvent the wheels, you might want a json encoder to transform data into strings and back. Or bitser if you want better performance and smaller files in exchange for human-readability.

Honestly, I just went with JSON because there's a nice Lua library for it (thank you https://github.com/rxi/json.lua).

I haven't thought about the file format much so far, just the experience of writing in it as if it's the "ground truth". We all seldom open our text files in a hex editor.

JSON https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

Get json.lua from here. Put it in your project directory alongside file1.lua.

Good point. How about this? It allows you to encode/decode Lua values into/from JSON.

I like this json library and tend to use it for save files (also makes them easy to edit by hand while debugging). It gets angry if you use tables with a mix of string and numerical keys, but I'd advise against that anyway. I've also used binser, which is also effective and easy to use.

lua json module can be found from here: https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries and lume are focused on gamedev; Penlight aims at bringing the breadth of python's stdlib to lua; plenary.nvim for nvim plugins; and probably more for other domains. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back because I found some implementations confusing/overcomplicated/inconsistent).

Making a lua-based distro might benefit from packing in an existing lua utility library instead of starting your own: lume (useful single file of utilities) or batteries (organized into modules).

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.

From lume:

Or check out Lume.

Yeah, lume is not a tiny library, but you can simply take only the functions you need from it. It's source code is very easy to read and (de)serialization implemented there in pretty minimalistic way.

I'm not very familiar with javascript and its spreading operator, but it seems to me that something similar is in lume. Check out lume.extend and lume.merge.