Make a game with Hoot for the Lisp Game Jam

https://spritely.institute/news/make-a-game-with-hoot-for-the-lisp-game-jam.html

by paroneayea • 2 years ago

102 24 2 years ago

spritely.institute

aredox2• 2 years ago

Any news on the front of non-GC LISPs? Carp [0] seems to be dormant...

[0]https://www.eriksvedang.com/carp

Edit: It is indeed dormant[1].

[1]https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp/issues/1460#issuecomment-2...

davexunit• 2 years ago

NLnet is funding Pre-Scheme https://nlnet.nl/project/Pre-Scheme/

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

Interesting, didn't know it was receiving money. Too bad it uses Scheme macros that I can barely stand... it'd be nice to have defmacro/quasiquote/gensym/etc... like some other Schemes provide.

randomifcpfan• 2 years ago

https://opengoal.dev/ has reverse-engineered a compiler and runtime for the non-GC lisp GOAL that Naughty Dog used for the Jax and Daxter action adventure games. They have decompiled the game code for all three games.

VyseofArcadia2• 2 years ago

Tangential rant:

My understanding is that Naughty Dog abandoned GOAL after the Jak games due to pressure from Sony. Sony wanted all of their studios to be able to share source code. [0]

I hate this. Any two organically grown codebases (like, for example, games from different studios) are going to be so different that significant, non-trivial code sharing between them is going to be impossible anyway. Anything sufficiently generic might as be distributed as a precompiled library, and then use the FFI in your language of choice to take advantage.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070720142546/http://lists.midn...

guenthert• 2 years ago

Any news on the front of non-GC LISPs?

Can't help you there other than suggesting not to rule out LISPs with GC. Rather than making the presence of a GC feature a deciding criteria, I'd try to determine what the maximum tolerable response time would be and whether GC would push beyond that (and whether it'll be possible to mitigate this, e.g. by CONSing less or forcing (small) GC at opportune times). I mean, we're not in the 80s anymore where BASIC programs stalled for seconds to clean up their string space or even early naughts with pre 1.3 Java. There's been a lot of progress on GC mechanism and while the one offered in the LISP system of your choice might not be of the same sophistication as those in a recent JVM, GC gets rarely in the way.

aredox2• 2 years ago

I do agree GC is not a deal breaker: it can be chosen (Nim has three different GC engines, java has several VMs), it can be tuned... But there is still a clear categorical difference between GCed Langs and non-GCed, even if the border has become somewhat porous. And Rust (well, its predecessors) and linear types have shown there is a way forward to manage memory directly without shooting oneself in the foot repeatedly.

Y_Y• 2 years ago

Shootouts to cwebber and Spritely, I love what they're doing to show Scheme off as a modern and practical language.

paroneayea2• 2 years ago

Thanks! Though definitely the shoutout goes to the Spritely team in general, particularly the Hoot team, and in this case, particularly David Thompson, who put together that lovely game jam template with the breakout clone! :) It's truly incredible working with such a talented team of people every day.

(And hope that was meant to be "shoutouts" and not "shootouts" ;) !)

NeutralForest• 2 years ago

I just wish it was easier to get started with Guile tbh. I'm an Emacs user so I don't have to learn Emacs to use Scheme and I still find the experience pretty bare-bone. There aren't many tutorials about creating Guile projects, writing tests, debugging, etc.

BaculumMeumEst2• 2 years ago

And there’s no step debugger available for guile in Emacs like there is for emacs lisp, Common Lisp, racket, and Clojure which is unfortunate

paroneayea2• 2 years ago

There is step debugging available in Guile plus Geiser, but it's not very reliable. You can call ,next for instance, see: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Interact... https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Debug-Co...

Unfortunately the problem is that Guile optimizes away whole chunks of code, and thus debugging information is not as good as it could be, and if you set traps they might be optimized out too. My understanding is that this could be made better, but could use a champion.

(The other trick is to turn off the optimizations when debugging, which is sometimes what I do.)

stephen_cagle• 2 years ago

What is the step debugger for clojure you recommend?

Make a game with Hoot for the Lisp Game Jam

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