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On the flip side Lua is a wonderful language because its small lib lets it go anywhere. We used to run a whole gamestate of a shipped title on PSP in a 400kb b

On the flip side Lua is a wonderful language because its small lib lets it go anywhere. We used to run a whole gamestate of a shipped title on PSP in a 400kb block allocation. I've yet to see that in any other dynamic language of consequence.

hinkley 7y ago
When I was still in that 'I should write a programming language' stage of career development, I worked on a pretty sophisticated (for the era) mobile app. PyPy was getting quite a bit of press around that time and my brain connected some dots. One of the ideas I wanted very much to explore is scaling the API, both up and down. For building something akin to PyPy, you might want a 'kernel', a small set of libraries that were available everywhere, and several other levels that include more or different things. Mobile takes the base and adds a few things suitable for mobile (storage, UI, broader networking). Desktop has a real UI, and then there's the kitchen sink like .Net and Java have. But you have the same problems you always have with decomposition - if you didn't guess the right boundaries when you built the thing then removing or rearranging bits is a serious PITA. Sometimes I think the best we can hope for is to leave clear messages for the next language so that it doesn't organize things the way we did.
nonbirithm 7y ago
LuaJIT is incredibly fast. It might just be the fastest scripting language out there. I think this was only possible because Lua itself is such a simple language. It says a lot that LuaJIT's implementation of this simple language is extremely complex in comparison to vanilla 5.1. Imagine the added complexity for something like Ruby that offers more than one associative data structure. With LOVE you get a complete game engine runtime with all the boring OS abstractions taken care of and you can just start working. I tried a few game development bouts with Rust since it seemed like a natural step up from C++ but the compile cycle kills a lot of my creative drive. I think this is just a consequence of the language being compiled, as with C++. With Rust having a wide variety of language features the compile time is increased also. At least we're lucky to have languages today that offer far shorter turnaround times for building prototypes.
pitaj 7y ago
Statically compiled languages like Rust can have a large a standard library as they want, because only the code that is actually used will get included in the binary.

hinkley 7y ago

When I was still in that 'I should write a programming language' stage of career development, I worked on a pretty sophisticated (for the era) mobile app. PyPy was getting quite a bit of press around that time and my brain connected some dots. One of the ideas I wanted very much to explore is scaling the API, both up and down. For building something akin to PyPy, you might want a 'kernel', a small set of libraries that were available everywhere, and several other levels that include more or different things. Mobile takes the base and adds a few things suitable for mobile (storage, UI, broader networking). Desktop has a real UI, and then there's the kitchen sink like .Net and Java have. But you have the same problems you always have with decomposition - if you didn't guess the right boundaries when you built the thing then removing or rearranging bits is a serious PITA. Sometimes I think the best we can hope for is to leave clear messages for the next language so that it doesn't organize things the way we did.

nonbirithm 7y ago

LuaJIT is incredibly fast. It might just be the fastest scripting language out there. I think this was only possible because Lua itself is such a simple language. It says a lot that LuaJIT's implementation of this simple language is extremely complex in comparison to vanilla 5.1. Imagine the added complexity for something like Ruby that offers more than one associative data structure. With LOVE you get a complete game engine runtime with all the boring OS abstractions taken care of and you can just start working. I tried a few game development bouts with Rust since it seemed like a natural step up from C++ but the compile cycle kills a lot of my creative drive. I think this is just a consequence of the language being compiled, as with C++. With Rust having a wide variety of language features the compile time is increased also. At least we're lucky to have languages today that offer far shorter turnaround times for building prototypes.

pitaj 7y ago

Statically compiled languages like Rust can have a large a standard library as they want, because only the code that is actually used will get included in the binary.