Best Practices

Local vs Global

When defining functions and variables in Lua, use the local keyword to prevent them from being added to the global Lua state. Otherwise, they will be considered global by default, which can lead to naming clashes with the API or plugins.

Good

local function foo()
  local bar = 0
end

Bad

function foo()
  bar = 0
end

Iterating over Child Nodes

Use vrNodeGetChild() and vrNodeGetSibling() to iterate over the children of a node. The vrNodeGetChildCount() and vrNodeGetChildByIndex() functions are not optimised for this purpose and may result in poor performance when iterating over lots of nodes.

See also: vrNodeForEachChild() and vrNodeForEachChildOfType().

Good

local child = vrNodeGetChild(node)
while child do
  -- Do something with the child.

  child = vrNodeGetSibling(child)
end

Bad

for i = 1, vrNodeGetChildCount(node) do
  local child = vrNodeGetChildByIndex(node, i)
  -- Do something with the child.
end