"import" after aot compilation?

[pvinis]

im using fennel for a project (specifically for a https://play.date game), and i am not sure what i need to write to have the output of the compilation be an import.

fennel:

; something with "CoreLibs/graphics"?

(playdate.graphics.drawRect 50 50 80 80)

(print "works")

lua:

import "CoreLibs/graphics" -- this one is missing, thats the one im trying to figure out how to have.
playdate.graphics.drawRect(50, 50, 80, 80)
return print("works")

any ideas?

[technomancy]

From what I can tell here the problem is the playdate devs seem to have forked Lua and broken the module system. I can't really tell what import does here; either it sets some values as globals, or it implicitly creates locals. Either one is real bad; it makes static analysis impossible, undermining the help that the compiler can give.

The weirdest part is that they didn't have to do this; require is flexible enough to do this without forking the language. But I guess there's nothing you can do about that.

I think the best you can do is use the lua special form to emit the import directly:

(lua "import \"CoreLibs/graphics\"")

It's included as a kind of escape hatch for things like this where Fennel can't emit the code you want because it's not part of Lua.

[andreyorst]

You can probably wrire a macro like pd/import, that will expand to call to the lua special: (macro pd/import [lib] `(lua (.. "import \"" ,lib "\""))) Or something like that. Check out the lua special in the reference for further details

[pvinis]

oOoOO interesting. I'll try that, thank you for the pointer!

[pvinis]

This totally worked (lua "import \"CoreLibs/graphics\"").

Thank you so much. Closing.