Why Silica?

Why should I use Silica?

Silica is designed for the core purpose of making awesome things super fast super easily ... or at least once you know how, but that's what the documentation's for. 😄

Now that we've got 66 times more pixels to play with you need to make sure your programs look pretty and function well!

Important Aspects to Consider

Silica is entirely different to any other ComputerCraft related frameworks or APIs. It's very different from Bedrock and is in another universe to your traditional single-file script based programs.

Here are the main points to consider before jumping into Silica development:

• Silica is entirely object oriented, it is impossible to use the traditional script based approach.

• Silica is not a graphics framework, it is an application framework.

• Silica is intended only to be used with GUI centric programs, you can't really use it for background programs.

• Silica is very different, and might be very confusing initially. If you haven't used object oriented programming before this isn't the best place to start.

• Forget about term.write, print, sleep and so on. They are never, ever used in Silica programs. Everything is done using other (better) methods.

• Silica projects are very multi-file heavy. If you've got lots of files and subclasses you're doing it right. Don't try to use less, it won't help you. Command/Control + P in Sublime Text will help too.

• Silica is very strict about many things. This is quite different to standard Lua. For example, indexing or setting a property you did't specify in your properties table will crash your program. The point of this is to eliminate bugs, it's very helpful, trust me.