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If only there was actually an Io community... If you notice, practically everyone in here mentions they've "dabbled" with Io, but practically no one is using th

by devin 16y ago

If only there was actually an Io community... If you notice, practically everyone in here mentions they've "dabbled" with Io, but practically no one is using this for production code. Io still doesn't even have releases which I find pretty disconcerting.

phaedrus 16y ago
That can be a problem. When I wanted to "freeze" a version of Io to use as a base for making the game engine scripting off of, there wasn't a point release I could refer to as "the last stable version". So I just took the then-most-recent github snapshot and forked it (forked in the github sense) and I will update that as I vett new versions of Io against my own code. It has proven to be stable enough not to be a problem, but I think when someone wants to get started in it, the lack of an official pre-built binary to download and install may throw people off. This has been discussed on the mailing list and I wouldn't be surprised if Steve is already working on getting some binaries like that up somewhere.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Lua. Seriously, check it out. Lua was born for scripting gaming engines.
- devin 16y ago
  Yeah I actually asked Steve about this and heard the "We're busy people; we have families" response. There's nothing wrong with this by itself, but when you couple it with the size of the community it makes me wonder if Io will forever be "a fun idea", but nothing more. I sincerely hope they get point releases up. Can you imagine someone with a casual interest in the language being in love with the fact that they have to keep their own version up to date and review core code for inclusion in their "version"? What about libraries across those frozen versions? It's a recipe for disaster and it pains me to no end that it hasn't been done yet.
Zev 16y ago
..but practically no one is using this for production code. Io isn't very fast, certainly not in comparison to MacRuby or IronRuby - or even YARV. It doesn't do all too well against Python or any other scripting language either. But, thats okay. The purpose of Io is (as I view it) to explore OO programming. And it is very good at that purpose.
silentbicycle 16y ago
Io has panache and a bunch of interesting ideas, but to me, the fact that I've never even been able to get it to compile on x86/BSD is telling. (And I've done a fair bit of porting.) I eventually switched to Lua, and I haven't regretted it for a second - it's dynamic and expressive, but still a mature, portable, and clean language.

by devin 16y ago

phaedrus 16y ago

That can be a problem. When I wanted to "freeze" a version of Io to use as a base for making the game engine scripting off of, there wasn't a point release I could refer to as "the last stable version". So I just took the then-most-recent github snapshot and forked it (forked in the github sense) and I will update that as I vett new versions of Io against my own code. It has proven to be stable enough not to be a problem, but I think when someone wants to get started in it, the lack of an official pre-built binary to download and install may throw people off. This has been discussed on the mailing list and I wouldn't be surprised if Steve is already working on getting some binaries like that up somewhere.

silentbicycle 16y ago
Lua. Seriously, check it out. Lua was born for scripting gaming engines.
devin 16y ago
Yeah I actually asked Steve about this and heard the "We're busy people; we have families" response. There's nothing wrong with this by itself, but when you couple it with the size of the community it makes me wonder if Io will forever be "a fun idea", but nothing more. I sincerely hope they get point releases up. Can you imagine someone with a casual interest in the language being in love with the fact that they have to keep their own version up to date and review core code for inclusion in their "version"? What about libraries across those frozen versions? It's a recipe for disaster and it pains me to no end that it hasn't been done yet.

Zev 16y ago

..but practically no one is using this for production code. Io isn't very fast, certainly not in comparison to MacRuby or IronRuby - or even YARV. It doesn't do all too well against Python or any other scripting language either. But, thats okay. The purpose of Io is (as I view it) to explore OO programming. And it is very good at that purpose.

silentbicycle 16y ago

Io has panache and a bunch of interesting ideas, but to me, the fact that I've never even been able to get it to compile on x86/BSD is telling. (And I've done a fair bit of porting.) I eventually switched to Lua, and I haven't regretted it for a second - it's dynamic and expressive, but still a mature, portable, and clean language.