Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

yet-another-blog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 264 posts

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

#161

Post by _gabe_ »

fefe23 wrote: post #156

Please choose more descriptive titles for your submissions here, people. Some dude I don't know is porting a game I know nothing about to a language I know nothing about and his reason is "because I feel like it". He has grievances about the current state of things and the port hasn't gotten anywhere yet. I have a hard time thinking of a blog post that would be less useful to me. No lessons learned, no "why you shoul…

You seem to just not be the target audience for this blog post. I enjoyed it because it fits in with a lot of the subjects that I've been looking into and it resonated with me. Your comment is the equivalent of saying that some research paper about a mathematical topic is terrible quality because it assumes you already know Calculus.

Edit: Also, the author mentions right at the start of the article:

> In this series of blogposts, I will document my experience of porting the game that I am currently working on... I’ve planned on doing this for a long time and want to keep some sort of record of my expectations, the journey and the result.

The point of this article is very clear from the beginning. It's simply documenting the authors journey. They don't need to provide any value to you. You didn't pay to read this article and they may want to keep a record for personal reasons. Putting it out their for the world is great since it allows other people to have a glance at how the experience went, and I hate when people leave discouraging comments because some article/video/entertainment doesn't cater to their every need.

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

#162

Post by vinyl7 »

3a2d29 wrote: post #39
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…

It’s hard to find any material on Jai. It seems to be a “better C”. Isn’t that what D / Zig try to do? What’s the advantage?

Here's a community run wiki that's been kept up-to-date https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki

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

#163

Post by BenFrantzDale »

ibiza wrote: post #108

> a big chunk of these vulnerabilities would not exist if C and C++ [...] simply didn’t have zero-terminated string, initialized values by default, had a proper pointer+length type thus replacing 90% of pointer arithmetic with easily bounds-checkable code, and had established a culture that discouraged the prevalent ad-hoc style of memory management. This is Rust's calling-card, so I find this plea for a better lang…

This is also C++20’s calling card. It has `std::span`.

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

#164

Post by throwaway17_17 »

bsder wrote: post #144
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…

> 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. Ayup. Talking about JAI is simply a waste of time until they put it in the open under a genuine open-source license. Otherwise, you wind up with situations like "Our Machinery".

Just curious, but when you genuine open-source license what do you include? Going back to the earliest talks on a potential language Blow cites a non-GPL, permissive license as his probable license. I know some folks tend to not count BSD, Public Domain, etc as open source.

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

#165

Post by cyber_kinetist »

suby wrote: post #153
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Odin was one of the clone languages at the start (although later it diverged from Jai in many aspects, and is far ahead Jai in the aspect that it's open-source and is actually being used in production). But really I would like Jai to take some time to mature over the years, instead of rushing out for an immediate public release. It has some very ambitious ideas that would absolutely be killer features, but…

Odin has similar syntax, but one of the main reasons I am interested in Jai is because it has strong meta-programming support[0], where as Odin doesn't and will likely never due to the author of the language not wanting to go in that direction. [0] - https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki/...

Yeah, I have about the same opinions. Odin made a conscious decision to not invest much in compile-time metaprogramming, and as a result was able to actually ship things without spending too much time on language design. But it’s a bit less ambitious than what Jai was trying to do.

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

#166

Post by bsder »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #164
bsder wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ayup. Talking about JAI is simply a waste of time until they put it in the open under a genuine open-source license. Otherwise, you wind up with situations like "Our Machinery".

Just curious, but when you genuine open-source license what do you include? Going back to the earliest talks on a potential language Blow cites a non-GPL, permissive license as his probable license. I know some folks tend to not count BSD, Public Domain, etc as open source.

Certainly anything OSI is acceptable. GPL isn't my cup of tea, but it's fine, too. Owner/authors are doing the work and if you don't like what license they choose, you can go elsewhere.

As long as no entity can retroactively revoke your ability to use the source code, it's probably sufficient.

As things currently stand, that is NOT true for JAI.

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

#167

Post by johnisgood »

mlyle wrote: post #21
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…

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

I highly doubt so. Rust is extremely complex and restrictive. For actually critical software, there is Ada/SPARK.

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

#168

Post by WalterBright »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #47
3a2d29 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to find any material on Jai. It seems to be a “better C”. Isn’t that what D / Zig try to do? What’s the advantage?

I think that Jai / Zig / Odin all started around the same time. D is closer to C++ than C, in my opinion. I suspect that Jai was an inspiration for Zig and Odin. Many developers in gamedev circles are still using C or orthodox C++ (C++ without most of the bullshit) but are frustrated by many features and gaps. Short compilation time is one of the big goals, as it is crucial for fast iteration. The goal is simply to h…

> D is closer to C++ than C

I'd put C++ as being between C and D, as D leaves a lot of things behind like the preprocessor.

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

#170

Post by WalterBright »

ibiza wrote: post #108

> a big chunk of these vulnerabilities would not exist if C and C++ [...] simply didn’t have zero-terminated string, initialized values by default, had a proper pointer+length type thus replacing 90% of pointer arithmetic with easily bounds-checkable code, and had established a culture that discouraged the prevalent ad-hoc style of memory management. This is Rust's calling-card, so I find this plea for a better lang…

I've proposed length-terminated strings in C, but it went nowhere:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html

When I look at buglists for C programs out in the field (homework for any language designer!), array overflows are the #1 problem.

Post reply on HN