Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough! I haven’t gone through it entirely. What do you recommend as primary texts? I have a few in mind (Practical Common Lisp, for example) but haven’t actually touched them yet.
I liked Practical Common Lisp. Also Paul Graham's "On Lisp" (Chapter 4 is a good example of the flavor of it).
Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can write Lisp in a way that you manage your own allocations, including avoiding the heap. It defeats part of the point of Lisp, but sometimes you can use that coding style for a subset of your program that shouldn’t be leaning on the GC too much. I don’t do game development, but in scientific computing, I rely on the GC a lot for workload preparation and other administrivia, then adopt a GC-famished Lisp style f…
Anyone know if there have been attempts at concurrent garbage collection in any of the major lisp implementations (whether CL or Scheme). Maybe Clojure?
Also Clasp's GC (via Boehm GC and MPS).
Last but not least, quoting: "when one runs ABCL on a suitable JVM with ZGC or Shenandoah, then it has parallel GC".
https://twitter.com/stylewarning/status/1387809546287022082?...
https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/pro-mailing-list-on-comm...
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently, but hopefully no longer in the near future, SBCL’s garbage collector is extremely meh. It’s hard to tune, it stops the world, etc. Otherwise SBCL is a wonderful implementation.
Is there some recent work going on in SBCL on its GC?
> A new garbage collector seems to be brewing in SBCL git...
https://twitter.com/stylewarning/status/1387809546287022082?...
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#34I think Lisp is wonderful, and I would love to develop games using Lisp. However, I was under the impression that, by all accounts, developing games in Lisp is completely unrealistic due to the garbage collector. I'm not familiar with Common Lisp, but in Racket, “GC pauses [...] typically run from 50ms to 100ms” [0]. On a 16ms maximum frame budget, that doesn't really work. Am I missing something? [0]: https://docs.r…
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naughty Dog historically disagreed with this [0], plenty of games these days are developed in languages with GC but it is a performance trade off. For maximum performance any Lisp is probably not the way to go but I don't think it's unfeasable. I want to say in general e.g. SBCL (a popular common lisp implementation) will perform a lot better than Racket. Racket is a great language but performance is not it's strong…
Currently, but hopefully no longer in the near future, SBCL’s garbage collector is extremely meh. It’s hard to tune, it stops the world, etc. Otherwise SBCL is a wonderful implementation.
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got some more information from Flatt. The new incremental mode means the 16ms deadline is within reach. In fact if the screen is not involved, then 1-2ms is reachable. On macOS a screen-refresh can cause a 16ms pause.
Didn't incremental GC exist before CS work even began? I certainly remember seeing it although it was not default. Or is this a different implementation?
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally recommend people avoid Land of Lisp as an introduction to CL book. It's simultainisouly too easy and too hard for most people approaching the language in that it goes way too briefly over core concepts then all of a sudden shifts gears into much more involved programming. That being said, it's probably the best second book on CL ever. It showcases a variety of lisp techniques on some very real and fun exa…
Fair enough! I haven’t gone through it entirely. What do you recommend as primary texts? I have a few in mind (Practical Common Lisp, for example) but haven’t actually touched them yet.
Touretzky's Gentle Introduction is popular, but targeted more at people entirely new to programming. The nice thing about this book is it is more like a college textbook in that it has many homework questions with answers in the back, so its great for structured practice.
Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp is still my favorite introductory text assuming the reader has knowledge of an existing functional language (using Javascript functionally for example). The books is a firehose of information, is short yet somehow manages to cover even more material than the other books, includes a full reference to CL, has a section on performance tuning I haven't seen in other intro texts, and still fits in meaty examples like a raytracer and a prolog-lite DSL. It's a real shame this book does not get a reprint, you'll need to buy a used version to get it at a decent price, however I'm finding myself using it as a reference so much I'm considering buying a new copy.
What I've found with learning CL as opposed to other langauges is that I get a lot of value out of reading multiple beginner texts. Rather than having a small number of core concepts like an OO language, CL just has a massive number of functions. This makes it nicer to work with IMO but just takes more repetition to learn.
An alternative approach I would love to see somebody try is to learn straight from Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming. The book has a brief introduction to the langauge at the start, then goes into writing actual very interesting code, then ends with a section covering some of the more detailed topics. If you're the kind of person who learns most by example of real-world code, it could work.
Re: Cl-bodge: a cross-platform Common Lisp game and application framework
#38:cl-bodge itself is still an experimental tech that has barely any documentation - I won't recommend using it directly, unless you are happy tinkerer that ain't afraid of guts from hell.
:trivial-gamekit though is a stable framework that have much better documentation and strives to be as simple as possible. Nothing experimental about it. It's dangerous to go alone into jams with CL-based games, take gamekit with you. The fact that it is based on :cl-bodge at the moment is an implementation detail.
:alien-works is an attempt to reuse everything C/C++ gamedev world has and drive it from CL without too much blood bolting from eyes. It's not very experimental - just some conventional stuff piled together, but still is in early stages of development (although it has passed proof-of-concept phase).
We are, as in #lispgames community, indeed very welcome you to join us on irc.libera.chat:6697 in #lispgames channel. Some of us can also be found on Lisp Discord server[0] in #lisp-gamedev channel.
We also have community twitter account[1] which is not super active, but still alive. Just smells funny.