Lua Carousel: program on the device you have, with docs at your fingertips


Ever since I published Lua Carousel 2 years ago as a lightweight programming environment for computers and mobile devices, I've taken pride in its stability. It has always tried to minimize change. You can depend on it, and it doesn't put you on yet another auto-update treadmill.

Today's update quadruples its size. Why is this? Well:

  • Its size has gone from 100KB to 400KB. Still not large in absolute terms.
  • 150KB went into bundling 4 fonts.
  • The remaining 150KB went into packaging a tiny hypertext browser and 200 help files, so you can look up documentation right from within Carousel. These help files support 4 different scenarios:
    • An initial tutorial on Carousel the tool.
    • Learning programming using a very gradual series of puzzles, each taking only a few seconds at a time.
    • Lots of example programs that you can directly run, modify and save copies of. This includes every single program from the Carousel devlog here on itch.io.
    • Reference documentation for Carousel and the interfaces it exposes from the LÖVE game engine and the Lua programming language.

As always I've tried to change as little as possible to the actual experience of using Lua Carousel. However, a change of this size may well have introduced bugs. Please report any issues. And please give the new "reference" menu button a whirl and let me know what you think of the online help. I'm sure it has many rough edges, which I will smooth out in the coming months.

Files

carousel2-ao.love 406 kB
23 days ago

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