fe VS lume

- Simple and easy to use C API

[1] https://github.com/rxi/fe/blob/master/doc/impl.md

Very cool! Quite similar to fe [1], a tiny, embeddable Lisp by the magnificent rxi. Seriously, if you like games and gorgeous C and Lua code, check out his projects and the games on itch.io!

[1] https://github.com/rxi/fe

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.