[myrmidon]

> can I save it to disk, shut off the interpreter, boot it again and it imports it fine (in which case it somehow dumps them as code...?

Yes, it dumps them as bytecode (probably not compatible between completely different interpreters).

It even preserves debug metadata, so stack traces involving serialized/deserialized functions look right, and still show the original source file.

This is really neat.

[girvel]

Thank you, it is really nice to hear. Though, I have to give credit to Lua's standard library -- the basic function serialization (without upvalues) is implemented there as `string.dump`.

[elpocko]

Be aware that you're gonna have a bad time in scenarios where code is serialized using one Lua version and deserialized using another. Bytecode compatibility is not guaranteed between different versions of Lua(JIT).

I've shipped Love2D games as bytecode that wouldn't run on many Linux boxes because their LuaJIT installation (which is not part of Love2D but part of the system) was too old, or they stopped working after the user updated their system. There's a plethora of situations where something like that can happen.

I'm also wary of the "upvalues are preserved" feature, which sounds like a huge footgun, but I haven't looked into the details of your implementation.