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

What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

calvinflegal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#31

Post by calflegal »

zuzululu wrote: post #7

was expecting a bit more substance but always interesting to read different approaches. but I do wonder if BEAM is a bit of an overkill, even fly.io (known among developer threads to be very unreliable uptime) wouldn't be my first pick. Cloudflare Durable Objects really is generous, not often can you get replicated database and realtime sync for such low barrier in cost and implementation. I do wonder tho what Cloudf…

Yeah I could've been more technical. Maybe in another post. On the fly issue, I love an underdog story. I know people have complained a lot about their uptime. I suspect they are grinding very hard on that. I've not really had any issues. They also seem to be a popular elixir host so I thought why not. Deploying is heroku style, "fly deploy".

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#32

Post by calflegal »

karado wrote: post #4

In my own projects I've found the feedback loop to be much slower in native mobile apps compared to web. For web apps my workflow has involved lots of human verification just through using the app myself and testing out the latest features/fixes. Sometimes I get the agent itself to do this before I do using Codex's chrome extension. This same process on mobile is a lot slower. How have you approached this aspect? Hav…

Nope. I guess I should try that at some point. I’d be looking into interacting with the Mac build for the performance reasons mentioned in the post, that iOS sims are slowww

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#33

Post by petejodo »

ramchip wrote: post #23
frail_figure wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloudflare Durable Objects really is generous, not often can you get replicated database and realtime sync for such low barrier in cost and implementation. BEAM gives it to you for free, and you don't rely on an Internet-scale monopoly to run it.

I love the BEAM and programmed on it for many years, but it really does not provide anything like durable objects. 1) It's very difficult to ensure globally serialized ownership with strong consistency in a distributed Erlang cluster when nodes are allowed to fail. Stuff like Horde will let you do some rough "run an instance of this process somewhere in the cluster", but it's eventually consistent (you may have multi…

Chris McCord just recently released a library trying to solve for this https://github.com/phoenixframework/durable_server

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#34

Post by linsomniac »

I've been really enjoying retro games in the form of '80s arcade games lately. Last weekend I had Claude build me a web-based Rally-X inspired game and the experience was pretty good. I like that I can just drop it into a github.io and be done with it, but that isn't going to work for a game that needs a backend. https://linsomniac.github.io/rally-xy/

I'm now working on a "nsnipes" game, and that, because of the multi-player aspect, is going to need a backend server.

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#35

Post by sdoering »

linsomniac wrote: post #34

I've been really enjoying retro games in the form of '80s arcade games lately. Last weekend I had Claude build me a web-based Rally-X inspired game and the experience was pretty good. I like that I can just drop it into a github.io and be done with it, but that isn't going to work for a game that needs a backend. https://linsomniac.github.io/rally-xy/ I'm now working on a "nsnipes" game, and that, because of the mult…

Thanks. That just killed 15 minutes of my working day. Much appreciated. I just needed that.

Love it. Went into my bookmarks for later tonight.

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#36

Post by chem83 »

Thanks for the write up. Wondering why not use something like Flutter for good cross platform support with good graphical performance on all systems.

One could argue that with agentic programming, releasing on a new platform is simply a matter of prompting for a new target, but I fear that the non-determinism of LLMs will lead into a whac-a-mole situation where you’re constantly fighting framework specifics and the code that the agent spit out to get to pixel perfect solutions across the platforms. Flutter in this case would be a more token efficient solution and quite fast on most platforms (particular the ones where their Impeller engine runs).

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#37

Post by weego »

chem83 wrote: post #36

Thanks for the write up. Wondering why not use something like Flutter for good cross platform support with good graphical performance on all systems. One could argue that with agentic programming, releasing on a new platform is simply a matter of prompting for a new target, but I fear that the non-determinism of LLMs will lead into a whac-a-mole situation where you’re constantly fighting framework specifics and the c…

Historically, iOS has been a second class citizen performance wise in Flutter. I certainly wouldn't rely on it as a gaming company.

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#38

Post by chrisweekly »

weego wrote: post #37
chem83 wrote: post #36

Thanks for the write up. Wondering why not use something like Flutter for good cross platform support with good graphical performance on all systems. One could argue that with agentic programming, releasing on a new platform is simply a matter of prompting for a new target, but I fear that the non-determinism of LLMs will lead into a whac-a-mole situation where you’re constantly fighting framework specifics and the c…

Historically, iOS has been a second class citizen performance wise in Flutter. I certainly wouldn't rely on it as a gaming company.

My (possibly outdated) take is that Flutter is all about Dart, and Dart is a Google thing w/ virtually no other adoption.

Re: What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift

#39

Post by colechristensen »

jiggunjer wrote: post #26
colechristensen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phoenix is delightfully fast and not having to deal with two entirely different application stacks where your application is split down the middle (or the javascript ecosystem) is a breath of fresh air.

Isn't split stack architectural, i.e. client heavy vs thin client. Not a hard TS feature?

With Phoenix you can write actually 0 code that runs on the client, just the backend and html templating.
Post reply on HN