Create your own Game Engine but don't use it • Hacker News Board

Re: Create your own Game Engine but don't use it

#111

Post by ihnorton » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #110

xemdetia wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really feel like this is a fair statement if you have done any game engine related development. Even 'writing from scratch' is still gluing together a whole soup of libraries and many of those libraries are C API only. Fonts? Use freetype. PNG's? use libpng. COLLADA? Audio? Audio files? Input? OpenGL/DX? As soon as you say you are throwing out C/C++ you better have amazing alternatives that make sense for the…

A growing number of languages are ABI-compatible with C. A small but significant subset of those languages is ABI-compatible with C++. Quite a few languages (Perl 6, Julia, Tcl w/ critcl, pretty much everything that uses libffi AFAICT) are able to do this without having to write full-blown wrappers for a whole C/C++ library (though you still need to wrap specific functions in most cases).

Julia JIT compiles C calls via LLVM, so there's no libffi performance overhead (similar to LuaJIT's CFFI, though that does not use LLVM).

Re: Create your own Game Engine but don't use it

#112

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:48 PM UTC

ihnorton wrote: post #111

yellowapple wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A growing number of languages are ABI-compatible with C. A small but significant subset of those languages is ABI-compatible with C++. Quite a few languages (Perl 6, Julia, Tcl w/ critcl, pretty much everything that uses libffi AFAICT) are able to do this without having to write full-blown wrappers for a whole C/C++ library (though you still need to wrap specific functions in most cases).

Julia JIT compiles C calls via LLVM, so there's no libffi performance overhead (similar to LuaJIT's CFFI, though that does not use LLVM).

Neither does Tcl's critcl AFAIK (I think it just sticks the C code in a Tcl extension and compiles it using the system compiler). My intent there was just to list cases where wrapping a whole C/C++ library is unnecessary, not to imply that Julia uses libffi :)

On that note, LLVM helps a lot here, too. Are there any LLVM-based languages that don't have some degree of C compatibility?

Re: Create your own Game Engine but don't use it

#113

Post by ihnorton » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #112

ihnorton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia JIT compiles C calls via LLVM, so there's no libffi performance overhead (similar to LuaJIT's CFFI, though that does not use LLVM).

Neither does Tcl's critcl AFAIK (I think it just sticks the C code in a Tcl extension and compiles it using the system compiler). My intent there was just to list cases where wrapping a whole C/C++ library is unnecessary, not to imply that Julia uses libffi :) On that note, LLVM helps a lot here, too. Are there any LLVM-based languages that don't have some degree of C compatibility?

Parse error on my part, excuse the pedantry :) Tcl is such a weird and wonderful language, and I occasionally miss it (though I don't miss working with a GUI written in C++ wrapped around tk).