Re: Reloading a Lua State

[Niklas Frykholm <niklas@...>]

> Now, let's say that I want to do something as nebulously-defined as
> "Reload all the scripts from disk, but keep the current mutated State."
> What insurmountable problems are going to prevent this from working in
> any reasonable fashion?

I use hot script-reloading in all my projects, with the simple rule:

	* To reload: just re-run the script

It is the script's responsibility to know that it might be reloaded in 
this way and "do the right thing" with respect to the global state. 
Doing the right thing typically means replacing functions (otherwise 
there would be no point in reloading) and not touching data. Could be as 
simple as:

	# Instead of
	MyClass = class()
	MyClass.do_stuff = function ...

	# we write
	MyClass = MyClass or class()
	MyClass.do_stuff = function ...

If you introduce this policy early, make sure that everybody uses it, 
and that "reload" is used frequently, then any reload-related bugs 
should be discovered and fixed quickly.

I think this is a lot simpler than creating a system where the scripts 
"don't know" that they might be reloaded and *you* have to do all the 
work to make sure that nothing breaks when they are.

// Niklas