What is the purpose of metatables and how do you use them?

You can write your topic however you want, but you need to answer these questions:

  1. What do you want to achieve? Keep it simple and clear! I want to achieve understanding of metatables and their purpose.

  2. What is the issue? I do not understand metatables. I just don’t see any purpose in using them.

  3. What solutions have you tried so far? Did you look for solutions on the Developer Hub? Definitely. I looked at many developer hub posts and community tutorials, but I still do not see any purpose of using metatables.

They have a wide variety of use cases, this topic has already been answered.

1 Like

I know it was answered lots of times, and I’ve scrolled through many posts so far. But I still do not understand, I’m going to now check the post that you’ve sent a link for.

There is no place you’re forced to use them, all metamethods have their own uses that you can use if need be.

Also not sure why this question keeps sprouting back.

1 Like

Not finding a purpose is fine! Many won’t find a purpose because they just aren’t necessary a lot of the time.

But generally their purpose is to allow for putting logic behind regular objects, which allow for powerful constructs such as operator overloading which are used extensively throughout the Roblox engine.

Generally you shouldn’t write “clever” code with metatables. And avoid magic (like __call) functions.

1 Like

I know I am not forced to use them. But, I’ve heard from many programmers that this is very useful and important to know.

That shouldn’t be of any influence if you at a time find no use for it.
Though there are several places you can write “clever” code using metatables, implementing inheritance in one use.

1 Like

I do not really find a purpose from that place I don’t understand them so well.

I did not understand that so well. But I am still going to tick your answer as a solution since it looks like it’s going to may help others.