paigeruten/lua-feels

Lua REPL that gives you a feel for its internals

lua-feels v0

What if programs made noise as they ran, giving you a feel for what's going on inside them?

This is a spinoff of https://github.com/paileyq/feels that will let you run a Lua REPL and visualize the Lua internals as it executes your code, all within the browser (thanks to WebAssembly).

Slides from a related presentation

Live demo

• REPL edition: https://paigeruten.github.io/lua-feels/feels.html
• Livecoding edition: https://paigeruten.github.io/lua-feels/feels-live.html

Usage

Pre-requisites: emscripten, make (if you aren't editing the C code, these aren't required and you can skip step 1, as the build artifacts are included in this repo)

1. cd lua/ and run make.
2. Open feels.html in your browser (you will probably need to run a local http server).
3. Type Lua code into REPL, and see nice sights and hear nice sounds in your browser as the code executes. :D

State of this project

It's a toy and I'm probably abandoning it for now. It's all yours. One day I'd like to create a comprehensive live visualization of all aspects of Lua's internals (parsing, codegen, VM, stack, GC, etc.) as it runs your code, but we'll see if that day comes.