I've just bought Kandria. I'm not much of a game player so I probably won't get much play out of it, but Shinmera is clearly pushing the bounds of the Lisp world, and that's something to support.
Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have access to Nintendo's SDK so I can't compare directly, but the article cites an inability to map executable pages. libnx supports this (but of course, this is moot if Nintendo wouldn't let you ship it). But the main benefit is being able to talk about and share your work without worrying about violating an NDA. https://switchbrew.github.io/libnx/jit_8h.html https://switchbrew.org/wiki/JIT_services
The OS can do it, and some Nintendo titles on the Switch do use this capability, but I have talked to Nintendo directly about using it, and it's a hard No. I can't even use the JIT feature purely for dev.
Really? What is the justification for allowing Nintendo titles to use it but not third parties? Security concerns?
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OS can do it, and some Nintendo titles on the Switch do use this capability, but I have talked to Nintendo directly about using it, and it's a hard No. I can't even use the JIT feature purely for dev.
Really? What is the justification for allowing Nintendo titles to use it but not third parties? Security concerns?
That's what they claim, but ultimately it's their thing, so they do with it whatever they like.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#44b/c it isn't described anywhere...
SBCL - "Steel Bank Common Lisp"
> Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a high performance Common Lisp compiler. It is open source / free software, with a permissive license. In addition to the compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common Lisp, it provides an interactive environment including a debugger, a statistical profiler, a code coverage tool, and many other extensions.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lisp languages seem well-suited for building games. The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation is a huge deal for feature building, incremental development, and bug-fixing. Retaining application state between code changes seems like it would be incredibly useful. Common Lisp also appears to be a much faster language than I would have blindly assumed. The main downside for me (in general, not jus…
> The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation SBCL and other implementations compile code to machine code then execute it. That is to say, when a form is submitted to the REPL, the form is not interpreted, but first compiled then executed. The reason execution finishes quickly is because compilation finishes quickly. There are some implementations, like CCL, with a special interpreter mode exclus…
I think a lot of this is confusion between online versus batch compilation? Most of us have only ever seen/used batch compilation. To that end, many people assume that JIT in an interpreter is how online compilation is done.
I probably am more guilty of that than I should be.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#46b/c it isn't described anywhere... SBCL - "Steel Bank Common Lisp" > Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a high performance Common Lisp compiler. It is open source / free software, with a permissive license. In addition to the compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common Lisp, it provides an interactive environment including a debugger, a statistical profiler, a code coverage tool, and many other extensions. https://www.…
"Steel Bank" in turn is a homage to "Carnegie Mellon" of CMUCL.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#47I have being using Trial[1] for the past few weeks to test out game development in Common Lisp, and have been having a great time. Being able to alter (almost) all aspects of your game while it's running is a blessing. I hope this port succeeds. [1]: https://github.com/Shirakumo/trial
Lisp languages seem well-suited for building games. The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation is a huge deal for feature building, incremental development, and bug-fixing. Retaining application state between code changes seems like it would be incredibly useful. Common Lisp also appears to be a much faster language than I would have blindly assumed. The main downside for me (in general, not jus…
If that's your main downside, that's pretty good, since clunkiness is in many ways fixable. Personally with standard CL I like to use property lists with keywords, so a "map literal" is just (list :a 3 :b 'other). It's fine when the map is small. The getter is just getf, setting is the usual setf around the getter. There's a cute way to loop by #'cddr for a key-and-value loop, though Alexandria (a very common utility library) has some useful utils for looping/removing/converting plists as well.
If typing out "(list ...)" is annoying, it's a few lines of code to let you type {:a 3 :b 4} instead, like Clojure. And the result of that can be a plist, or a hash table, or again like Clojure one of the handful of immutable map structures available. You can also easily make the native hash tables print themselves out with the curly bracket syntax.
(On the speed front, you might be amused by https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-cod... But separately, when you want to speed up Lisp (with SBCL) even more than default, it's rather fun to be able to run disassemble on your function and see what it's doing at the assembly level, and turn up optimization hints and have the compiler start telling you (even on the individual function level) about where it has to use e.g. generic addition instead of a faster assembly instruction because it can't prove type info and you'll have to tell it/fix your code. It can tell you about dead code it removed. You can define stack-allocation if needed. Simple benchmarking that also includes processor cycles and memory allocated is available immediately with the built-in time macro...)
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#48Awe-inspiring work Shinmera and Charles.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lisp languages seem well-suited for building games. The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation is a huge deal for feature building, incremental development, and bug-fixing. Retaining application state between code changes seems like it would be incredibly useful. Common Lisp also appears to be a much faster language than I would have blindly assumed. The main downside for me (in general, not jus…
> The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation SBCL and other implementations compile code to machine code then execute it. That is to say, when a form is submitted to the REPL, the form is not interpreted, but first compiled then executed. The reason execution finishes quickly is because compilation finishes quickly. There are some implementations, like CCL, with a special interpreter mode exclus…
> the form is not interpreted, but first compiled then executed
That's TempleOS technology right there.
Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
#50> The answer to that is that while I would desperately like to share it all publicly, the NDA prevents us from doing so. I'm curious what the rationale here was for using the official SDK, rather than the unencumbered "homebrew" ones[0]. As a complete guess, maybe Nintendo doesn't let you officially publish games built using 3rd party SDKs? [0] https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Setting_up_Development_Environme...
You cannot publish games with homebrew, it has to use the official SDK. Besides that, almost nobody has a jailbroken Switch, so it would make it extremely hard to play any games on anything but an emulator.
> almost nobody has a jailbroken Switch
This isn't really my scene so I don't know the details, but I remember reading that the first 10+ million Switches produced have an unpatchable bootloader exploit. I'm sure you're correct that almost nobody actually has a hacked console, but my understanding is that they're readily available for people who want one.