I’ve been mainly working in a knit-like game framework for a few years now. Me and a friend have recently been remaking it, and everyone knows that the biggest pitfall with Knit is lack of intellisense. Roblox unfortunately doesn’t have an open source luau parser, so I used luaup by @jackhexed to parse scripts, it is a pretty impressive pure luau parser that gave me everything I needed. The biggest hurdle with this plugin (after reference tracking) was locating the places that the framework, called Mince, gets bootstrapped. Mince is designed to be dynamically bootstrapped wherever you want. As a result, determining where the server and client are loaded from requires literally searching every instance in the game for the scripts that do the bootstrapping. Here’s what that looks like:
Here’s what the autocomplete looks like:
And it does actual reference and variable tracking, it isn’t just matching strings. This allows you to use Mince dynamically and still get autocomplete:
It also has linting with a few rules to help prevent errors occuring in your game
My big question is whether this makes knit-like frameworks viable for other people. I’m aware Knit has its detractors, so if I open sourced this game framework and this plugin, would you see it as something helpful? I personally find working in the framework to be very fast and efficient, even moreso now that I’ve been using this plugin for about a month.