API Overview

Shield's authoritative contracts are spread across the documents below; this page is only a navigation hub and no longer inlines summaries — summaries go stale as contracts evolve, and they once included the deprecated shield.db:* / shield.redis:* legacy forms (data access now goes uniformly through the plugin namespace shield.database.*, see lua-api.md).

Document Navigation

• Lua API Contract — the authoritative entry point for the Lua user API (shield.spawn/send/call/..., the plugin namespace shield.database.*, etc.).
• Lua API Tests — the API acceptance matrix.
• Architecture Overview — the refactored architecture overview.
• Runtime Semantics Decisions — runtime semantics decisions A1-A35.
• Quick Start — the C++ entry point shield::run and a minimal example.
• Game Backend Tutorial — an end-to-end Lua example.

Implementation Status

• examples/hello_world/ is the user reference example; it is not the sole acceptance criterion for API correctness.
• include/, src/, and tests/ reflect the current implementation state.
• Until the API is stable, no complete per-module API manual is maintained.
• The Lua bindings are implemented per the contract (a few items such as shield.event are marked as target contracts; see the per-section implementation snapshots in lua-api.md); the old shield.service, colon-style DB/Redis calls, and on_message(src, type, data) are deprecated.

C++ API Goal

The goal is a single entry point:

#include "shield/shield.hpp"

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    return shield::run(argc, argv);
}

This entry point is implemented: both src/main.cpp and examples/hello_world/main.cpp call shield::run(argc, argv) directly.