Scopes

Just like how a signal's connection may need to be disconnected, a source's effect also may need to be disconnected.

But the disconnecting of many signals and connections is tedious and verbose. Vide instead operates on the concept of scopes which provides a much cleaner API, given that you follow a few rules.

Scopes come in two flavors; stable and reactive.

All scopes must be created within another scope with the exception of root()
Stable scopes never rerun
Reactive scopes can rerun
A reactive scope cannot be created within another reactive scope

effect() creates a reactive scope. root() creates a stable scope.

Whenever a scope is destroyed, any scope created within that scope is also destroyed, and so on. This is why all scopes must be created within another scope, except root() which is used to create the initial scope that you can manually destroy.

local root = vide.root
local source = vide.source
local effect = vide.effect

local function setup()
    local count = source(0)

    effect(function()
        print(count())
    end)

    return count
end

setup() -- will error since effect() tries to create a reactive scope outside of a stable scope

local count = root(setup) -- ok since effect() was called within a stable scope
count(1) -- prints "1"

The scope created by root() can be destroyed.

local function setup()
    local count = source(0)

    effect(function()
        print(count())
    end)

    return count
end

local destroy, count = root(setup)

count(1) -- prints "1"

destroy()

count(2) -- effect is destroyed; no longer prints

Vide's reactivity can be represented graphically, as a reactive graph.

The reactive graph for the above example looks like so:

%%{init: {
    "theme": "base",
    "themeVariables": {
        "primaryColor": "#1B1B1F",
        "primaryTextColor": "#fff",
        "primaryBorderColor": "#1B1B1F",
        "lineColor": "#79B8FF",
        "tertiaryColor": "#161618",
        "tertiaryBorderColor": "#161618"
    }
}}%%

graph

subgraph root
    direction LR
    count --> effect
end

When the stable root() is destroyed, the reactive effect() scope will also be destroyed since it was created within it.

This is important because you may have an effect that updates the property of a UI instance, meaning the effect is referencing and holding that instance in memory. The effect being destroyed will remove this reference, allowing the instance to be garbage collected.

You don't need to worry about ensuring all your effects are created within a stable scope, since you should be creating all your UI and effects within a single top-level root() call that puts all your UI together, making it safe to assume any effect created will be created under this stable scope.

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Scopes

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