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I'm making an editor, Freja, which is like a tiny Emacs with graphical support. Makes it fun to create gui apps and games. :) Ultima Underworld inspired game I

I'm making an editor, Freja, which is like a tiny Emacs with graphical support. Makes it fun to create gui apps and games. :) Ultima Underworld inspired game I'm making for a game jam: https://youtu.be/1fWsV83P-S8 https://youtu.be/1fWsV83P-S8 Demo of pixel editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOBi805nxNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOBi805nxNc Freja: https://github.com/Saikyun/freja https://github.com/Saikyun/freja --- My experience has overall been very nice. I come from Clojure, and comparing to that: - so nice and small! Clojure is great but has a lot of baggage from JVM, for good and bad - very easy to get started interoping with C. You need to manually wrap libraries, but I think it's pretty easy. As a benefit, you are able to throw exceptions from C that can be catched from Janet. The C support is what sells me on Janet over Clojure - repl:ing works well, but you can get tripped up by early binding and lack of namespaces. There are ways around it, but when coming from Clojure it was a bit hard to wrap my head around - many libraries that you'd want are already wrapped, like http-servers and postgresql connections. But ofc this is an area that is thinner than older languages. It's decently easy to wrap C-libs though - easy to understand data structures if you've used JS / Lua -- "everything is a hashmap" (but there are also arrays and strings)

diskzero 5y ago
Freja looks really cool! Thanks for sharing it. I find these types of projects very inspiring. They bring back the wonder and joy that I felt when I first discovered computers in the early 80s. You felt like you were in control of a whole new world and anything was possible.
- saikyun 5y ago
  Thank you! That is exactly what I'm going for. :) My friend said "so you're just making basic?", haha. I didn't get to experience C64 / Amiga era, but after having listened to 100s of interviews with swedish game developers it seems that the automatic (or even required) access to a coding environment sparked a lot of creativity and imagination. :) I hope Freja can capture at least a part of that.
spsesk117 5y ago
Wow! Some really cool projects, thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check out Freja later this evening! Thanks so much for the info and commentary!
- saikyun 5y ago
  Thank you. :) If you do try it out, I'd be happy for any feedback on Freja! :) I should mention that Windows support is currently a bit behind, so if you're on Windows I could fix that then comment here again when it's done. :)
sesm 5y ago
Why do you mean by ‘throw exceptions from C’? C has no exceptions.
- ahungry 5y ago
  In libjanet you can use a C call like janet_panic() that'll "panic" and throw an exception/error up in the active Janet runtime (so when something bad/unexpected happens in your C code you are providing an API to from Janet, you'd use this).
  - saikyun 5y ago
    This is what I was referring to, sorry for being unclear. :)
- swdunlop 5y ago
  That is like saying Scheme does not have exceptions, except in C, we have setjmp instead of call/cc. It is technically correct, but there is something more flexible that can be perverted into doing the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling

diskzero 5y ago

Freja looks really cool! Thanks for sharing it. I find these types of projects very inspiring. They bring back the wonder and joy that I felt when I first discovered computers in the early 80s. You felt like you were in control of a whole new world and anything was possible.

saikyun 5y ago
Thank you! That is exactly what I'm going for. :) My friend said "so you're just making basic?", haha. I didn't get to experience C64 / Amiga era, but after having listened to 100s of interviews with swedish game developers it seems that the automatic (or even required) access to a coding environment sparked a lot of creativity and imagination. :) I hope Freja can capture at least a part of that.

spsesk117 5y ago

Wow! Some really cool projects, thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check out Freja later this evening! Thanks so much for the info and commentary!

saikyun 5y ago
Thank you. :) If you do try it out, I'd be happy for any feedback on Freja! :) I should mention that Windows support is currently a bit behind, so if you're on Windows I could fix that then comment here again when it's done. :)

sesm 5y ago

Why do you mean by ‘throw exceptions from C’? C has no exceptions.

ahungry 5y ago
In libjanet you can use a C call like janet_panic() that'll "panic" and throw an exception/error up in the active Janet runtime (so when something bad/unexpected happens in your C code you are providing an API to from Janet, you'd use this).
- saikyun 5y ago
  This is what I was referring to, sorry for being unclear. :)
swdunlop 5y ago
That is like saying Scheme does not have exceptions, except in C, we have setjmp instead of call/cc. It is technically correct, but there is something more flexible that can be perverted into doing the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling