4 ms·

OCaml supports imperative, functional, and OOP just fine, and you use whichever makes more sense, and it has a REPL, too, most popular one is called "utop", but

OCaml supports imperative, functional, and OOP just fine, and you use whichever makes more sense, and it has a REPL, too, most popular one is called "utop", but "ocaml" works. As for graphics debuggers, I have no idea if OCaml has a graphical one (if that is what you meant), but there is ocamldebug[1][2]. That said, I agree, why not just use Lua? Seems like the perfect language when you only care about the game itself and not the underlying stuff. There are many other alternatives that are better than Clojure anyways. I might be pessimistic, but I doubt Clojure is going to catch on. [1] https://ocaml.org/docs/debugging https://ocaml.org/docs/debugging [2] https://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/debug.en.html https://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/debug.en.html (contains section "Using the debugger under (X)Emacs")

simne 1y ago
Well, I'll believe you about fp debugger, so only problem left with OcaML and Clojure, each of them have GC with non-linear complexity (Clojure as I understand using BEAM GC which claimed soft-realtime, meaning 90% of GC work will look like realtime, but OcaML using some typical GC), and what all these mean for games - they will suffer framedrops or even short freezing, when GC running. Exist two approaches to overcome GC problem, but if somebody will again minus my comment I will not bother to find links in my records. 1. Here on HN mentioned GC-free fp platform. 2. Few years ago appeared GC algorithm with linear complexity (sure, with limitations, but good enough for example for 16-bit consoles level games). Unfortunately, haters minusing comments, but don't add anything valuable, and author was not mentioned these problems.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  > Unfortunately, haters minusing comments, but don't add anything valuable Tell me about it. It happens so often that I am very reluctant to leave comments now, especially on topics that I know people have already made up their mind and are not willing to discuss it with an open mind. That said, I did just leave a comment about something I probably should not have, but oh well. Is it really Clojure that uses BEAM? I thought it was a JVM-based language, I would have to look this up. BTW OCaml finally has multicore support, which was a long time coming. As for GC, you might find OxCaml interesting or to your liking: https://oxcaml.org/[1] https://oxcaml.org/[1]. [1] Especially this part: "OxCaml gives programmers tools to control allocations, reducing GC pressure and making programs more cache efficient and deterministic.".
  - simne 1y ago
    Thank you! For Closure, I just confused it with Elixir. Unfortunately, I see very familiar things from Perl world - many people made really interest things alone, but for some reason, they don't organize to make one direction really on par with commercial platforms (even when with current technologies could make efficient distributed governance, and even could make significant sells for sustainable development). I mean, people disperse resources, making many good small things, but most Open Source software recessing or even in crisis without moving ahead. I've seen JVM, BEAM, CLR at field with heavy load, they all have significant drawbacks, but from my opinion, CLR ecosystem developing faster than other mentioned.
  - iLemming 1y ago
    > I thought it was a JVM-based language Clojure is not a "JVM-based" language, it's a hosted language - means Clojure is designed as an abstract language that can be implemented on different runtime platforms. The language's core abstractions (persistent data structures, protocols, vars, etc.) are not tied to any particular host - it's just that JVM variant was first and remains the main focus. Clojurescript run on JS VMs, ClojureCLR on .NET, ClojureDart - targets DartVM, babashka is great for scripting, SCI - for small embedded Clojure DSLs. There is also Clojerl - that runs on BEAM, and Jank for native compilation. You can run Python in Clojure and Go, and it just keeps growing. Seriously, one could learn only Clojure and write code for [almost] any platform.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      That is good to know, thanks!
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  Oh I'd love some talk on GC-free FP platforms!
  - yogthos 1y ago
    https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I had this project starred and completely forgot about it!
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      wow thanks I had heard of this then totally forgot about it. This is super cool!
- wedesoft 1y ago
  Good point. I definitely need to keep an eye on garbage collector pauses. I am using the new ZGC which supposedly has very short garbage pauses.
iLemming 1y ago
> why not just use Lua? Because there isn't "true" REPL. Non-homoiconic languages don't have the same kind of REPLs, because every step in them - Read, Eval, Print and Loop have slightly different semantics. I just wrote my Hyprland config in babashka - native Clojure scripting engine. Once I build a socket management function that connects me to hyprctl, I was able to do the rest from within my editor connected to the REPL. I would write (hypr-cmd :clients), eval it, get the list of windows in my WM, and then filter, group, sort, etc. It is so much nicer to build things "from within", most people who never experienced that, wouldn't get it. I'm running my WM and fully controlling it by writing code and executing it in-place, from the editor running in that same WM - without saving the code, without compiling it, without restarting the WM or my editor. I'm programming my shit as if I'm playing a video game. If I was a game developer, for sure, I would stick to the same mentality - why the heck work on a game, if I can build it by playing?
- johnisgood 1y ago
  What about Fennel, would that work? As for the rest, yeah, I have used stumpwm before and configured it on the fly. :D
  - iLemming 1y ago
    Fennel already "works". There's a small community of devs around it and in my opinion and practice, it remains a better choice to use instead of Lua directly. I don't even hesitate - whenever I need to tap into Lua-based engines, I would try to bootstrap Fennel on top - I use it with Hammerspoon, with Neovim, with mpv, and if I at some point I finally decide to switch to Wez terminal, I will for sure use Fennel. That being said, Fennel is nice but ain't ideal, it's rather weird. It tries to imitate Clojure syntactically, without actually posing as a Clojure dialect. Fennel is extremely thin layer over Lua - you're essentially writing Lua with s-expressions. In Fennel, you constantly feel Lua's presence (1-indexed arrays, table semantics, nil behavior), while Clojure abstracts over Java/JS/Dart/etc., much more heavily with its own semantics. I constantly feel like I'm missing good CLJ ergonomics - no built-in immutable data structures; no rich standard library; limited REPL experience; The difference in philosophy is that Fennel prioritizes being "just a syntax" for Lua and Clojure prioritizes being a "better language" that happens to run on JVM/JS/.NET/Dart/etc. Makes Fennel feel more like a transpiler - remember the days of Coffeescript? I guess, maybe all that actually makes Fennel more appealing to some - abstraction layer thickness sometimes does matter. I personally, wish for an actual Clojure dialect on top of Lua, rather than something "like Clojure".

simne 1y ago

Well, I'll believe you about fp debugger, so only problem left with OcaML and Clojure, each of them have GC with non-linear complexity (Clojure as I understand using BEAM GC which claimed soft-realtime, meaning 90% of GC work will look like realtime, but OcaML using some typical GC), and what all these mean for games - they will suffer framedrops or even short freezing, when GC running. Exist two approaches to overcome GC problem, but if somebody will again minus my comment I will not bother to find links in my records. 1. Here on HN mentioned GC-free fp platform. 2. Few years ago appeared GC algorithm with linear complexity (sure, with limitations, but good enough for example for 16-bit consoles level games). Unfortunately, haters minusing comments, but don't add anything valuable, and author was not mentioned these problems.

johnisgood 1y ago
> Unfortunately, haters minusing comments, but don't add anything valuable Tell me about it. It happens so often that I am very reluctant to leave comments now, especially on topics that I know people have already made up their mind and are not willing to discuss it with an open mind. That said, I did just leave a comment about something I probably should not have, but oh well. Is it really Clojure that uses BEAM? I thought it was a JVM-based language, I would have to look this up. BTW OCaml finally has multicore support, which was a long time coming. As for GC, you might find OxCaml interesting or to your liking: https://oxcaml.org/[1] https://oxcaml.org/[1]. [1] Especially this part: "OxCaml gives programmers tools to control allocations, reducing GC pressure and making programs more cache efficient and deterministic.".
- simne 1y ago
  Thank you! For Closure, I just confused it with Elixir. Unfortunately, I see very familiar things from Perl world - many people made really interest things alone, but for some reason, they don't organize to make one direction really on par with commercial platforms (even when with current technologies could make efficient distributed governance, and even could make significant sells for sustainable development). I mean, people disperse resources, making many good small things, but most Open Source software recessing or even in crisis without moving ahead. I've seen JVM, BEAM, CLR at field with heavy load, they all have significant drawbacks, but from my opinion, CLR ecosystem developing faster than other mentioned.
- iLemming 1y ago
  > I thought it was a JVM-based language Clojure is not a "JVM-based" language, it's a hosted language - means Clojure is designed as an abstract language that can be implemented on different runtime platforms. The language's core abstractions (persistent data structures, protocols, vars, etc.) are not tied to any particular host - it's just that JVM variant was first and remains the main focus. Clojurescript run on JS VMs, ClojureCLR on .NET, ClojureDart - targets DartVM, babashka is great for scripting, SCI - for small embedded Clojure DSLs. There is also Clojerl - that runs on BEAM, and Jank for native compilation. You can run Python in Clojure and Go, and it just keeps growing. Seriously, one could learn only Clojure and write code for [almost] any platform.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    That is good to know, thanks!
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
Oh I'd love some talk on GC-free FP platforms!
- yogthos 1y ago
  https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I had this project starred and completely forgot about it!
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    wow thanks I had heard of this then totally forgot about it. This is super cool!
wedesoft 1y ago
Good point. I definitely need to keep an eye on garbage collector pauses. I am using the new ZGC which supposedly has very short garbage pauses.

iLemming 1y ago

> why not just use Lua? Because there isn't "true" REPL. Non-homoiconic languages don't have the same kind of REPLs, because every step in them - Read, Eval, Print and Loop have slightly different semantics. I just wrote my Hyprland config in babashka - native Clojure scripting engine. Once I build a socket management function that connects me to hyprctl, I was able to do the rest from within my editor connected to the REPL. I would write (hypr-cmd :clients), eval it, get the list of windows in my WM, and then filter, group, sort, etc. It is so much nicer to build things "from within", most people who never experienced that, wouldn't get it. I'm running my WM and fully controlling it by writing code and executing it in-place, from the editor running in that same WM - without saving the code, without compiling it, without restarting the WM or my editor. I'm programming my shit as if I'm playing a video game. If I was a game developer, for sure, I would stick to the same mentality - why the heck work on a game, if I can build it by playing?

johnisgood 1y ago
What about Fennel, would that work? As for the rest, yeah, I have used stumpwm before and configured it on the fly. :D
- iLemming 1y ago
  Fennel already "works". There's a small community of devs around it and in my opinion and practice, it remains a better choice to use instead of Lua directly. I don't even hesitate - whenever I need to tap into Lua-based engines, I would try to bootstrap Fennel on top - I use it with Hammerspoon, with Neovim, with mpv, and if I at some point I finally decide to switch to Wez terminal, I will for sure use Fennel. That being said, Fennel is nice but ain't ideal, it's rather weird. It tries to imitate Clojure syntactically, without actually posing as a Clojure dialect. Fennel is extremely thin layer over Lua - you're essentially writing Lua with s-expressions. In Fennel, you constantly feel Lua's presence (1-indexed arrays, table semantics, nil behavior), while Clojure abstracts over Java/JS/Dart/etc., much more heavily with its own semantics. I constantly feel like I'm missing good CLJ ergonomics - no built-in immutable data structures; no rich standard library; limited REPL experience; The difference in philosophy is that Fennel prioritizes being "just a syntax" for Lua and Clojure prioritizes being a "better language" that happens to run on JVM/JS/.NET/Dart/etc. Makes Fennel feel more like a transpiler - remember the days of Coffeescript? I guess, maybe all that actually makes Fennel more appealing to some - abstraction layer thickness sometimes does matter. I personally, wish for an actual Clojure dialect on top of Lua, rather than something "like Clojure".