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Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

verdagon.dev

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Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#12
post #2

Always a pleasant surprise to be scrolling through HN and seeing one of my articles on the front page! For anyone interested in how that code would get zero memory safety overhead without the classic borrow checker, a big part of it is because of the "region borrow checker" [0]. There are some other factors (iso regions, hybrid-generational-memory, etc.) but region borrow checking is the big one. [0] https://verdagon…

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Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#13
post #3

That just seems like poor discipline. But not like creating a typesetting system to use to write your book. It seems like it is shaping up to a pretty nice language. But writing the compiler in itself is very 20th-century. Just add a parser to LLVM or Gcc and call it good. But don't make the mistake C, C++, and Rust did, using a prefix dereference operator. Pascal got that one right. BTW: "get" in a pure function nam…

This comment is a roller-coaster and I love it.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#14
There should be a competition of yak shaving.

I've writing a Rust based canvas engine, with content via my own IDE, the runtime is fed data via WebSocket using my own API protocol, web proxy routing through a streaming and distributed load balancer using a new protocol, landing on my back-end platform running my own language, writing deltas to my own data store. https://www.adama-platform.com/

Why? For board game glory!

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#16

There should be a competition of yak shaving. I've writing a Rust based canvas engine, with content via my own IDE, the runtime is fed data via WebSocket using my own API protocol, web proxy routing through a streaming and distributed load balancer using a new protocol, landing on my back-end platform running my own language, writing deltas to my own data store. https://www.adama-platform.com/ Why? For board game glo…

It's not quite yak shaving, but it certainly is... something:

> I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser in flash. People can't possibly want that. But they need it.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326

(Not mine, but seems relevant)

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#17

I don’t get why are programmers so obsessed with the tools they use for the job? More than any profession

Because languages are not tools, but rather media. They are the basis for the structured thought that unveils, as such their form and function is critical to the process of programming.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#18

I don’t get why are programmers so obsessed with the tools they use for the job? More than any profession

You should check out the comment section of a woodcrafting (or the like) Youtube channel. I think 'tool obsession' is probably a personality trait and one you're more likely to see in your day to day in programmers than in other crafters due to proximity to the internet. Oh, sewing rooms are another good hit for that as well.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#19
It's interesting that this phenomenon is much more prevalent in game development, as opposed to (for example) web development: some people build their own web development frameworks, but it seems like every game dev tries to make an engine at some point.

My theory why: good web frameworks consider developer experience to be of paramount importance, and invest heavily into examples, documentation, and API improvements. Unreal and Unity by comparison are unpleasant to work in. The UI is clunky, the examples cap out after a certain point of complexity, and community input is almost nothing when compared to the Django, Express, Rails, or language-specific ecosystems.

Anyway, I can't say I've ever made it far enough down the rabbit hole to want to make my own language... but I know for me, the desire to make my own engine* has punctuated every attempt over the years to get better at both Unity and Unreal

*Acknowledgment that I might be partially disproving my own point, as I've tried to build both my own web framework, AND my own game engine... but I spent a lot more time on the game engine (https://github.com/RobertTownley/gamehook)

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#20
post #16

There should be a competition of yak shaving. I've writing a Rust based canvas engine, with content via my own IDE, the runtime is fed data via WebSocket using my own API protocol, web proxy routing through a streaming and distributed load balancer using a new protocol, landing on my back-end platform running my own language, writing deltas to my own data store. https://www.adama-platform.com/ Why? For board game glo…

It's not quite yak shaving, but it certainly is... something: > I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser in flash. People can't possibly want that. But they need it. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326 (Not mine, but seems relevant)

Wow. That's amazing. Any other stories you know like that one?
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