Small example "freewheeling" app that can be modified without restarting

new file-system format for freewheeling apps

  1. No more version history, now we have just the contents of the current version.

  2. Editing a definition no longer changes the order in which definitions load.

This should make repos easier to browse, and more amenable to modify. You don't need driver.love anymore. And a stable order eliminates some gotchas. For example:

using driver.love, define Foo = 3 in a definition define Bar = Foo + 1 edit and redefine Foo = 4

Before this commit, you'd get an error when you restart the app. Definitions used to be loaded in version order, and editing a definition would move it to the end of the load order, potentially after definitions using it. I mostly avoided this by keeping top-level definitions independent. It's fine to refer to any definition inside a function body, we only need to be careful with initializers for global variables which run immediately while loading.

After this commit you can still end up in a weird state if you modify a definition that other later definitions use. In the above example, you will now see Foo = 4 and Bar = 4. But when you restart, Foo = 4 and Bar = 5. But that's no more confusing than Emacs's C-x C-e. It's still a good idea to keep top-level definitions order-independent. It's just confusing in a similar way to existing tools if you fail to do so. And your tools won't tend to break as badly.

Why did I ever do my weird version history thing? I think it's my deep aversion to risking losing any data entered. (Even though the app currently will seem to lose data in those situations. You'd need to leave your tools to find the data.) Now I rely on driver.love's undo to avoid data loss, but once you shut it down you're stuck with what you have on disk. Or in git.

I also wasn't aware for a long time of any primitives for deleting files. This might have colored my choices a lot.

Created by  Kartik K. Agaram  on April 16, 2023
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