I've always been frustrated with Arc's lack of a standard practice for loading dependencies (although I suppose akkartik might consider that a feature ^_^ ).
If the way Arc's lib/ directory has been used is any indication, the way to do it is:
- Start in the Arc directory when you run Arc, and never cd out of it.
- (load "lib/foo.arc"), or (require "lib/foo.arc") if you want to avoid running the same file multiple times
But I think for some Anarki users, the preferred technique has been somewhat different:
- Invoke Anarki from any directory.
- Ignore lib/ as much as possible. On occasion, load a library from there by using (load "path/to/arc/lib/foo.arc"), but a few libraries may make this difficult (e.g. if they need to load other libraries).
When I started writing Arc libraries, the first thing I wrote was a framework for keeping track of the location to load things relative to, so that my other libraries could load each other using relative paths regardless of which of the above techniques was in use. But the Lathe module system didn't catch on with anyone else. XD
More recently, eight years ago, rntz implemented the current-load-file* global variable that may make it easier for Anarki-specific libraries to compute the paths of the libraries they want to load. Nothing is currently using it in Anarki however.
> - Start in the Arc directory when you run Arc, and never cd out of it.
Yeah, this makes sense if you're making something that only you use, but if I'm trying to make something a little more portable, like (as you mention) a library.
I'll have to look more into Lathe, and even current-load-file*.
