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

Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

ebiten.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#11

Post by barrenko »

kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Anything else you can recommend for starting out with game dev and appropriate algorithms? Is C++ a must?

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#12

Post by chana_masala »

kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Ebiten is actually making me want to get back into Go itself. I'd love to make a cross platform game and it may just motivate me enough to push through my ideological biases against Go.

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#13

Post by djur »

hu3 wrote: post #2

Hajime Hoshi is a true gem and the Go ecosystem is incredibly lucky to have him. He was very approachable and friendly when I was toying with game development in Go. I should get back to finishing that game in Ebiten. The tooling alone puts a smile on my face.

Which tooling in particular?

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#14

Post by djur »

chana_masala wrote: post #12
kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Ebiten is actually making me want to get back into Go itself. I'd love to make a cross platform game and it may just motivate me enough to push through my ideological biases against Go.

I'm not big on Go either but I feel like it's a good fit for hobbyist game development. It's a lot harder to write automated tests for games, so the value of static typing is higher, but most simple game designs don't really benefit from the powerful type systems of a Rust or Haskell (or even a TypeScript). It's one of the cases where Go actually does feel like a "better C".

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#15

Post by philosopher1234 »

chana_masala wrote: post #12
kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Ebiten is actually making me want to get back into Go itself. I'd love to make a cross platform game and it may just motivate me enough to push through my ideological biases against Go.

I've yet to meet an ideological bias against Go that took into account & understood the practical tradeoffs Go is making. The ones I've seen thus far are dismissive and incurious. But if you've got that, I would love to hear it.

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#16

Post by chana_masala »

djur wrote: post #14
chana_masala wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebiten is actually making me want to get back into Go itself. I'd love to make a cross platform game and it may just motivate me enough to push through my ideological biases against Go.

I'm not big on Go either but I feel like it's a good fit for hobbyist game development. It's a lot harder to write automated tests for games, so the value of static typing is higher, but most simple game designs don't really benefit from the powerful type systems of a Rust or Haskell (or even a TypeScript). It's one of the cases where Go actually does feel like a "better C".

> but most simple game designs don't really benefit from the powerful type systems of a Rust or Haskell (or even a TypeScript).

I get that feeling too but I have no experience with game development. I wonder what reasons you think so?

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#17

Post by chana_masala »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #15
chana_masala wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebiten is actually making me want to get back into Go itself. I'd love to make a cross platform game and it may just motivate me enough to push through my ideological biases against Go.

I've yet to meet an ideological bias against Go that took into account & understood the practical tradeoffs Go is making. The ones I've seen thus far are dismissive and incurious. But if you've got that, I would love to hear it.

I actually mostly agree. I just don't really like the aesthetics of writing Go, which I know is a silly reason.

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#18

Post by tmountain »

kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Just came here to say that I also love Ebiten. It's so simple. It stays out of your way, and it has a ton of great examples. One of my goals for this year is to finally finish a game (after talking about it for over a decade). Ebiten is going to help me accomplish that goal.

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#19

Post by pizza234 »

barrenko wrote: post #11
kamranjon wrote: post #6

I absolutely love ebiten, it's gotten me back into game development which was why I initially got into software dev. I've been working through the Game Programming Patterns book and it's been an awesome platform to learn some of the common patterns in game dev. Also the maintainer is incredibly active and constantly pushing the development forward. I'm currently working on a side-scroller and am really excited to see…

Anything else you can recommend for starting out with game dev and appropriate algorithms? Is C++ a must?

There are game libraries for many languages, so for beginners to game development, anything will do. Small libraries abstract a few functionalities over the lower level ones (sprite batching, input/events handling, etc.) and handle multiplatform. Larger libraries may take care of other aspects (game loop, scene graph, etc.) and specialize on certain game types (3D, platform, RPG, etc.).

C++ is probably a must if you one writes large games and/or performance critical ones (regarding "high performance"/low level languages, Rust libraries are immature).

Scripting languages (e.g. Python/PyGame) can be a good (quick) way to start and experiment. But readability falls very quickly when complexity grows (e.g. difficult to interpret inheritance tree), so at some point one may easily feel the need to switch to a statically typed language.

Regarding algorithms, a very common beginners book is "Game Programming Patterns", which is also available for free in HTML: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html.

Re: Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch

#20

Post by philosopher1234 »

chana_masala wrote: post #17
philosopher1234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to meet an ideological bias against Go that took into account & understood the practical tradeoffs Go is making. The ones I've seen thus far are dismissive and incurious. But if you've got that, I would love to hear it.

I actually mostly agree. I just don't really like the aesthetics of writing Go, which I know is a silly reason.

I'm not one to call aesthetics silly. The act of reading and writing programs relies heavily on the programmers emotion, and so I think aesthetics matter greatly. What don't you like about them?
Post reply on HN