Introducing Require-by-String

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#142

The formal specification of require-by-string in Luau restricts the first component of a require path to be one of the following: ., .., or @.

Paths that begin with / were explicitly forbidden because they resemble absolute paths, and we don’t want to introduce those into the language (preferring aliases that begin with @ instead).

It is possible that we will permit unprefixed/paths/like/this in the future, but that would be a larger change that has not yet been approved or even proposed. Adding support for @self, on the other hand, was approved in the RFC I linked above: Adjust the meaning of relative `require()` calls within `init.luau` by andyfriesen · Pull Request #109 · luau-lang/rfcs · GitHub.

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#143

I couldn’t find a post about something like this but I may have missed it:
Would maybe some sort of shorthand for accessing the DataModel in require-by-string be considered, like “@root” or something of the like, or would that fall into the category of an absolute path?

#144

Yes, something like this is on our roadmap—we’re looking into supporting aliases pointing at various top-level services like @ReplicatedStorage, but it just hasn’t been added yet. We are also looking into a way to allow you to define your own aliases.

When we say absolute paths are forbidden, we mean paths like this: /an/absolute/path. Aliased paths will ultimately be the correct way to “jump around” to new locations in the DataModel.

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