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Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

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Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#81

Post by _aavaa_ »

4v0v wrote: post #48
_aavaa_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with most of your points, I am not sure what this has to do with the parent you're replying to. The one part I disagree with is: > A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave. One of Blow's critique of C++ is specifically that it's trying to be the everything language. Jai's goal is to be for video game develo…

It's false, he never said that it was only for games.

Either the word "only" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence, or you're simply wrong [0].

Yes you could program anything in the language, just like you could programming anything in any language. But he's designing the language for video game development. The whole reason he's making it is specifically for video game development, and he's been very explicit that he believes that a language should not try to be designed for use in every application.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1...

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#82

Post by skohan »

didip wrote: post #50

This person might as well said that he is not planning to finish his game. Screwing around with tooling and languages seems to be a common pitfall to not finishing a game. Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity and get the game out of the door fast?

"Kitchen Sink" engines like Unreal and Unity come with their own set of assumptions which may or may not help to deliver a given game. If you want to make a game which is radically different than the industry standard, you're going to have to spend a lot of time working around those baked-in assumptions, and it may be more efficient to choose another approach.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#83

Post by Kranar »

4v0v wrote: post #48
_aavaa_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with most of your points, I am not sure what this has to do with the parent you're replying to. The one part I disagree with is: > A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave. One of Blow's critique of C++ is specifically that it's trying to be the everything language. Jai's goal is to be for video game develo…

It's false, he never said that it was only for games.

I mean this is a little pedantic. It's true he never said that only games are able to use his language as if it were some kind of law, but he did say that his language is being designed to address issues that video game developers face and that was his main, and almost exclusively his only concern.

If other domains benefit from that, he's not going to actively bar them from using his language, but he also won't give them much consideration.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#84

Post by cyber_kinetist »

klodolph wrote: post #66
naikrovek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity laughable. absolutely laughable. I'm not even talking about politics of using an engine versus writing one; unity and unreal are complex tools with their own problems. if you value what you are producing, and if you value quality and you want your game to be just the way you want it, Unity and Unreal will fight you just as hard as D or C++ have been for the blog…

> laughable. absolutely laughable. It’s really not laughable. I’ve made games with off-the-shelf engines and I’ve made games using just code and libraries. Sometimes not even libraries. The main concern here is that you have a limited amount of time to work on your game. Some people try to sidestep this concern by saying that they’ll “spend as much time as it takes” or something like that, but since these projects of…

If the game was a more typical 3D action-adventure or FPS/TPS shooter, then using one of the two engines might have been much better for development time. But this is a complex 2D sandbox simulator with procedural generation and a custom physics engine, so I'm not sure how Unity or Unreal might aid in developing this game in any way.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#85

Post by klodolph »

Keyframe wrote: post #55
StevePerkins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past decade, I watched HN's and Reddit's hype waves cycle through server-side JavaScript, Golang, Haskell, and now Rust. With plenty of secondary favorites in the mix like Julia, Nim, Zig, etc. A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave. Ultimately, you either enjoy tinkering with programming languages for persona…

Javascript absolutely took its position. Speaking of those waves, where did Ruby and RoR go? Seems completely dead on HN whereas 'back in the day' it was top most talked thing. LISP would be a guest of honor - always there, never here.

I think Ruby and RoR just didn’t quite survive the transition to much heavier client-side JavaScript apps. Ruby peaked sometime around 2009 and back then, the browser landscape was much more diverse, and it was common to support IE6. It’s easy to forget how much of a burden IE6 was on web developers.

Ruby also suffered from a proliferation of ill-advised programming practices (monkey patching) and there was also some drama in the Ruby community (Rails Is a Ghetto). These were fixable problems and the Ruby community took steps to stop monkey patching everything and maybe address the other problems, but in the end, I think would-be Rails developers started using Node.js, and Ruby fell from the public spotlight.

As far as I can tell, Python survived by virtue of tools like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, PyTorch, OpenCV, etc. Kind of a universal glue language for people who don’t want to write C or C++. Otherwise, I think of Python and Ruby (as languages) as nearly interchangeable. Python had its own issues to work through (2 -> 3) and its own drama, but it settled in some more stable niches and seemed to have fewer mercurial personalities at the center of it all.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#86

Post by stackbutterflow »

jimbob45 wrote: post #56
mlyle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to actually believe that Rust will eat C's lunch for systems programming.

The disparity between Rust jobs and C/C++/C#/Java/Golang jobs on Indeed is staggering. Even worse, most of the Rust jobs are blockchain-related and may not survive the coming blockchain downturn. It may be the case that some people use Rust but without Rust jobs, there will be no pool of experienced developers to later draw on.

Hasn't the downturn already happened?

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#87

Post by dboreham »

dymk wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how this language is planning on ever seeing adoption when it’s been restricted from open use since it’s inception. Seems like vaporware.

If you watch JB's videos (actually they're posted by someone else on YouTube I believe, taken from his Twitch streams), the language definitely exists.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#88

Post by cyber_kinetist »

klodolph wrote: post #80
naikrovek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Blow is a skilled craftsman with stuff like this and he knows he's going to get a bunch of Opinions About His Language from people who think they have a complete superset of his knowlege, and he is making his language without involving those people in any way.

That’s fair, but if you look at his posts about the language, he also makes a big point about how he doesn’t want any input from people with an academic background in language & type theory. This smells like anti-intellectualism to me. I’m a bit concerned that some of the decisions that he’s making in the language are leading towards traps that have caught other language designers in the past, but because he’s reject…

I think his disdain towards academia isn't really anti-intellectualism (he's not ignorant of compiler theory knowledge, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to write a compiler from scratch in the first place! And his interest in programming languages seems to span decades, from what I remember from one of his streams). I think he's critical of the fact that the primary focus of academia and industry in computer science have diverged so much over the years, such that most academic CS works haven't really helped developers in building better programs and tools. Thinking about the countless hours compiler academics have spent on all sorts of esoteric parser theory in the past, while all the production compilers today are using recursive decent for pragmatic reasons... maybe this kinda makes sense.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#89

Post by unwind »

As someone who is aware of jai but not at all following the development, do the terms of the closed beta the OP is in permit code to be shown?

I guess "yes", it seems so pointless otherwise.

Would be very interesting to see e.g. "here is how this (gnarly) C++ turned into beatiful jai", zoomed-in to actual code level.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#90

Post by _trackno5 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #17

I'd love to see more about Jai. I don't understand why they are not working in the open, this is a tool, not a game, input for a large community is extremely valuable. But as brilliant as Jon Blow is, he is at least equally as stubborn. Fast compilation and nice, easy to read syntax with good default is exactly what I am looking for. I can understand the hype about metaprogramming, and its potential usefulness, but I…

> input for a large community is extremely valuable

it’s also an extreme time suck. Having everyone opine on their pet feature would just take away from the focused work the people at Thekla are doing.

Honestly, I don’t even see why Jon should make things open source (apart from it being a major incentive for people to adopt it). The performance improvements they are offering compared to other languages 100% warrant charging for it.

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