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Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

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Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#71

Post by thedracle »

StevePerkins wrote: post #20
dymk wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how this language is planning on ever seeing adoption when it’s been restricted from open use since it’s inception. Seems like vaporware.

Over the past decade, I watched HN's and Reddit's hype waves cycle through server-side JavaScript, Golang, Haskell, and now Rust. With plenty of secondary favorites in the mix like Julia, Nim, Zig, etc. A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave. Ultimately, you either enjoy tinkering with programming languages for persona…

I always look for practical application.

I think cutting through the hype-train is something every engineer learns with time, but some times there are diamonds to be picked out.

At least for my own anecdotal experience, Rust has lived up to a lot of the hype for the time-critical low-level projects I was formerly performing with C/C++.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#72

Post by [deleted] »

StevePerkins wrote: post #20
dymk wrote: post #8

I don’t understand how this language is planning on ever seeing adoption when it’s been restricted from open use since it’s inception. Seems like vaporware.

Over the past decade, I watched HN's and Reddit's hype waves cycle through server-side JavaScript, Golang, Haskell, and now Rust. With plenty of secondary favorites in the mix like Julia, Nim, Zig, etc. A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave. Ultimately, you either enjoy tinkering with programming languages for persona…

[deleted]

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#73

Post by anta40 »

mattarm wrote: post #10
gavinray wrote: post #4

It's worth mentioning that DMD is a reference compiler and not meant as a production tool. DMD is for fast compile time during dev cycles and testing new language features early. You've got the LLVM and GCC compilers for production. The problem with lack of debug info on Windows in D is solved by using LDC with LLDB/GDB to debug You can also ask the compiler to emit CodeView debugging info if you want to stick with M…

I don't think "DMD is a reference compiler and not meant as a production tool" is a great way to characterize it. There are certainly valid reasons for choosing LLVM and GCC for "production", but also valid reasons for choosing DMD.

As far as I know, DMD doesn't offer much optimisations.

So you use DMD for development, and once the testing is done, built the production release with LDC or GDC.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#74

Post by throwaway17_17 »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #45

I’m in the private beta and things are changing constantly. I’m not sure why anyone would pick a language that won’t ever have a real ecosystem of libraries. Coming from C++ and need to remain low-level? Pick Rust, done.

With the almost total incompatibility in mindset and preferences between Jai and Rust, I’m not sure if this is actually practical ‘advice’. I can’t help but think most devs that want to use Jai are avoiding Rust purposefully so advising them to skip Jai as a potential replacement for their low level development needs and use Rust is just not going to happen.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#75

Post by mrtweetyhack »

naikrovek wrote: post #57
didip wrote: post #50

This person might as well said that he is not planning to finish his game. Screwing around with tooling and languages seems to be a common pitfall to not finishing a game. Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity and get the game out of the door fast?

> Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity laughable. absolutely laughable. I'm not even talking about politics of using an engine versus writing one; unity and unreal are complex tools with their own problems. if you value what you are producing, and if you value quality and you want your game to be just the way you want it, Unity and Unreal will fight you just as hard as D or C++ have been for the blog…

No post body was provided.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#76

Post by jessermeyer »

nomel wrote: post #62
naikrovek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity laughable. absolutely laughable. I'm not even talking about politics of using an engine versus writing one; unity and unreal are complex tools with their own problems. if you value what you are producing, and if you value quality and you want your game to be just the way you want it, Unity and Unreal will fight you just as hard as D or C++ have been for the blog…

Could you give an examples of a game that used a custom game engines that couldn’t achieve what they wanted in Unreal or Unity? Edit: The only style I would think would be infinite/strange geometry, like Manifold garden (great game!). But, it’s Unity.

I've worked on several. You haven't heard of them because none of them shipped due to issues with commercial engines (in particular Unreal Engine 4).

They are very difficult to use if the game play semantics are complicated and require lots of interaction with world state or world geometry. If you're making a common FPS, they are great.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#77

Post by throwaway17_17 »

dmitriid wrote: post #2

Can't wait to see how this progresses. So far the only source of knowledge have been Blow's streams, but he's the author, and he knows his language inside and out. It will be immensely interesting to see other people's experiences.

Tsoding, coding on Twitch and with archives on YouTube has a few streams from after he got into the beta. They give a decent overview of using the language in its current state, and I find Tsoding petty entertaining as well.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#78

Post by googlryas »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #49
hbn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why a language can't be one guy's passion project. Even if he releases it and it turns out he's the only person that likes it, so what? It's not like he's had millions in VC or government investment dumped into it or something. He's got some ideas and he's implementing them. I'm interested to see how it turns out. Golang has had success and was primarily made in private by 3 guys and hasn't strayed too fa…

Yeah, of course he can do whatever he wants. The think is that quite a few people have been convinced by his talks and want to use Jai for real projects.

If there's enough actual interest, some group of people will just clone the language in an open manner since enough is known about it. But that doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#79

Post by cyber_kinetist »

didip wrote: post #50

This person might as well said that he is not planning to finish his game. Screwing around with tooling and languages seems to be a common pitfall to not finishing a game. Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity and get the game out of the door fast?

I think for the type of game that he's working on ("a 2D physics sandbox game that lets you explore the galaxy"), a custom handmade engine might be far better than using one of the mainstream game engines. His game is in 2D, so the shiny 3D renderers that Unity and Unreal have won't really matter that much. And his game seems to contain lots of performance-sensitive physics and geometry code that needs to be tailor-made to his game, so the default solutions in Unity and Unreal will be probably be unusable (so they would need to be written from scratch anyway). The goal he's setting for is very ambitious even for a 2D game, and Unity/Unreal will probably limit him too much.

That said, I think many of the decisions towards his rewrite in Jai seems to come from him picking the wrong language (D) at the start. He should have sticked with C++ in the first place, even with all its warts and complexities. It's a proven language that has shipped countless games, have tons of tooling developed around it, and provides one of the biggest ecosystems available to a game developer (and unlike D, has debuggers that actually work!). And you can certainly improve compile times a lot by using unity builds, managing your header dependencies well, and not going too overboard with templates (though I agree this can become a major pain point, especially if you're using a laptop).

Re: Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

#80

Post by klodolph »

naikrovek wrote: post #59
doodpants wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Jonathan Blow's main goal is to make his dream game programming language so that he can be happier while developing all of his future games. Widespread adoption by others is only a secondary concern. He also doesn't want to push it out to the general public until he feels it's ready, and wants to take the time to get it right first.

Jonathan Blow is a skilled craftsman with stuff like this and he knows he's going to get a bunch of Opinions About His Language from people who think they have a complete superset of his knowlege, and he is making his language without involving those people in any way.

That’s fair, but if you look at his posts about the language, he also makes a big point about how he doesn’t want any input from people with an academic background in language & type theory. This smells like anti-intellectualism to me.

I’m a bit concerned that some of the decisions that he’s making in the language are leading towards traps that have caught other language designers in the past, but because he’s rejecting that expertise, he has to learn from experience, at greater cost. These concerns are motivated by specific things I’ve seen in Jai code, but I don’t really want to dive into the specifics, since Jai is unavailable.

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