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Jai Language Primer

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Re: Jai Language Primer

#41

Post by gregstula »

greggman wrote: post #33
davidgrenier wrote: post #9

I stopped caring at no garbage collection.

I'm with you on this. I'm an old school gamedev. Shipped games on Atari 800, C64, NES, and most system since then. I hated garbage collection for the longest time. But, I have to acknowledge plenty of games are shipping with garbage collection. Unreal has garbage collection. Unity games have garbage collection. They seem to all be running just fine and there's plenty of large AAA games or close to AAA games made with…

They do not have garbage collection. You're conflating game development with game engine development. When a big powerful, flexible, C++ engine has been written for you, you can use C# or JavaScript or BluePrints to use the engine to make a game.

Re: Jai Language Primer

#42

Post by CyberDildonics »

davexunit wrote: post #32
CyberDildonics wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

garbage collection and a language that doesn't run as fast as performance minded C++ are not going to be used in hardcore game programming. You don't have control over the memory allocation or layout. For non native game programming there are many many choices.

This shows a bias that high-level languages do not have native code compilers that can generate faster code than what someone writes in C/C++. This is not true. Some of these compilers can produce better native code because the language lets you write better code in the first place.

I wasn't talking about all high level languages, just LISP. My experience is that people who like a particular language try to rationalize and convince others that there is no downside.

I would love to see and example of LISP being as fast as C++ with multi-threading and cache coherency taken into account, using the same amount of memory, with no pauses from the gc that would affect interactivity. If it hasn't happened in the last half century though, I don't think it's going to happen at all.

Re: Jai Language Primer

#43

Post by [deleted] »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #38
gregstula wrote: post #10

> Abstractions like RAII, constructors and destructors, polymorphism, and exceptions were invented with the intention of solving problems that game programmers don’t have This is the only part of the Jai philosophy I struggle to understand. How is an explicit delete keyword better than deterministic destruction? From my perspective, the former method reintroduces the problem the latter method solves. Also, polymorphi…

There are cases where virtual functions lend a lot of flexibility, but for games they are usually a sign of a programmer that doesn't understand how pointer chasing destroys performance. If you look at Ogre (and I think box2d) both architectures could be massively sped up by not using arrays of pointers.

[deleted]

Re: Jai Language Primer

#44

Post by CyberDildonics »

davexunit wrote: post #34
CyberDildonics wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that right now with Love2D and a stub game loop that sources the actual implementations every second or two.

That is a far cry from a REPL.

It's better than a REPL, that allows you to write a game completely live. I'm not sure what you think is lost since you didn't back up what you are saying with anything.

Re: Jai Language Primer

#45

Post by oconnor0 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #25

One language to look at for reference that most people haven't heard of is Clay. It isn't kept up any more, but it's aim was to be a modern generic C. It made use of very clean generic programming with move semantics and no garbage collection. The person who wrote it was using it as a substitution for C at his work already.

Maybe because it hasn't been updated in 3-4 years?

Re: Jai Language Primer

#46

Post by pandaman »

gregstula wrote: post #10

> Abstractions like RAII, constructors and destructors, polymorphism, and exceptions were invented with the intention of solving problems that game programmers don’t have This is the only part of the Jai philosophy I struggle to understand. How is an explicit delete keyword better than deterministic destruction? From my perspective, the former method reintroduces the problem the latter method solves. Also, polymorphi…

Games (I am talking about AAA here, have no idea about all possible games) are not written in the style that leaves place for constructors/desturctors. The data is better in tables (i.e. arrays) than spread all over the memory and accessible through a pointer network. The reasons being: a) walking an array is orders of magnitude faster than walking a pointer chain and b) heap allocation wastes more memory

This, in turn, makes no sense for polymorphism since you already have uniform data in the arrays there is no need to do an expensive indirect jump to figure its type.

Re: Jai Language Primer

#47

Post by whitegrape »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #26
whitegrape wrote: post #3

I wonder if Blow has ever looked at Nim. Sometimes I hallucinate that game devs will have an Awakening and realize it's the way forward.

Doesn't Nim use garbage collection? Also the compiler isn't even stable, it is an interesting language but can't be take seriously for professional development yet.

Use of GC in Nim is up to you -- you can malloc/free as you please if you want and avoid it altogether. I'm not sure to what extent you can/can't make use of the standard library if you avoid GC, but even if you lessen your restrictions and use it a little bit, it's a highly tuneable/controllable and understandable GC including support for swapping out entirely different GC algorithms.

Professional game development as in AAA studios? Yeah, probably not, but more for the tooling alone than whatever language any particular studio happens to use. Professional indie game development? It's ready, even though it's not at 1.0 yet. Indie devs deal with big breaking upgrades to their frameworks (Unity, Corona, etc.) all the time, it's annoying but not a deal-breaker if the language gets those sometimes too.

Re: Jai Language Primer

#48

Post by dom96 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #25

One language to look at for reference that most people haven't heard of is Clay. It isn't kept up any more, but it's aim was to be a modern generic C. It made use of very clean generic programming with move semantics and no garbage collection. The person who wrote it was using it as a substitution for C at his work already.

What's cool is that Clay's designer is now working for Apple on Swift https://github.com/jckarter

Re: Jai Language Primer

#49

Post by tomp »

davexunit wrote: post #28
hacker_9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we look at Lisp we see archaic user interfaces, legacy keywords such as car, cdr and cons which bear no meaning to us mere mortals. Also no clear consensus on what extensions to use. Why are there so many dialects? Can you not agree on something that works? Where is your IDE with error underlining and autocomplete list that comes up with each keystroke? And finally s-expressions, which make you twist your mind i…

>When we look at Lisp we see archaic user interfaces, legacy keywords such as car, cdr and cons which bear no meaning to us mere mortals. Also no clear consensus on what extensions to use. Car, cdr, and cons take very little time to understand, but yes their meaning is steeped in history. "car" returns the first element of a pair, "cdr" (pronounced like "could-er") returns the second element of a pair, and "cons" cre…

> S-expressions [...] allow for syntactic abstraction

I never bought this argument, based on my intuition, but now Julia has proved this argument to be invalid. Insisting only S-expressions allow macros is simply intelectually dishonest. Go check how Julia does metaprogramming; all the power of Lisp with none of the wierdness.

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