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Restraint.

How so? In Lua, pass-by-value is only done with numbers, and everything else, you're passing around a pointer under the hood.

Is there a reason I'm not thinking of?

Yeah, I just don't buy this. It says nothing. This is the bottom-barrel suggestion most people bring up, and there's more to simplifying codebases than "strict types."

What in this <2k LOC file suggests strict types help anything whatsoever? It's not massive. It's large, but fold this and it immediately becomes more readable. Any attempts to simplify this would simply be reasoning about it differently.

I'm tired of "game engines" that aren't. There's more to game development than exposing a load-update-draw loop and providing bindings to libraries. The most frequent example of this is a game framework when accurately marketed.

But I've come to call tech like this a "game software suite" when sufficiently advanced. Further, software like Unity and Unreal Engine are also just game software suites. They aren't true engines, because you still have to write everything yourself.

Imagine someone provided you the metal and engineering concepts to build an engine, but never supplied the engine itself. That's consistently, time and time again, what the games industry on the hobbyist side has provided.

Well, thanks for providing bindings I guess. Any sufficiently advanced language with an FFI can automatically do most of that work for me.

But it isn't a game engine in the same respect as any of the Quake, Source, IW engine, or derivative engines.

Where's my console? Where's my UI layer? Where's my map loading and format? Where's my multiplayer? No server browser protocol or architecture? No matchmaking? Where's my key and controller binding system? Oh, there isn't one?

It's not an engine. It's a collection of library interfaces.

Library => Framework => Engine. What's missed almost every single time is that to build an engine, you actually need a framework to dictate how a game loop performs behaviors, schedules, tasks, entity dispatch, sound emitters, and how all of these things should be networked and how they should work over split-screen or on difference devices.

If you see something exposing load-update-draw, it's at best a framework. Like the XNA of yesteryear or the LÖVE of today, that's what it is.

But a true game engine doesn't have you building your own console variable and replication system. It should come out of the box. That's the point.

That's the entire point. And if you're not working on nearly exclusively game logic, you're probably not working on a game engine. Or you're sure as hell doing both engine and game development with a half-baked game software suite.

Sorry this took me all day to get back to you, but thank you for the response! The work you're doing is excellent, and it's fascinating to see the evolution of it.

I appreciate the informative breakdown. It gives me a much better understanding of the value proposition. You have a particularly unique understanding of the challenges embedders have and it's great that we have another option in the industry. Thanks for your time!

Hi I'm [redacted], I author lcef, LuaJIT FFI bindings for Chromium Embedded Framework at https://github.com/Planimeter/lcef. I also work on Planimeter's Grid Engine, the largest 2D Lua game engine on GitHub. So, I'm fully invested in both exposing libraries to languages like Lua, and directly integrating those offerings with software.

So, while people are in here talking about Electron, which is most likely not your target audience and might be confused as a result, I am your target audience. I am looking for ways to move away from my engine's imperative UI system and to migrate to web-based UIs in an OpenGL setting, and I have been for years.

Adam, this looks great, and I've been waiting to see new solutions like this in the game development space for quite some time now. However, the only truly viable solution at the moment in my opinion is still CEF. The proprietary aspect is significant, and while some using Unity and Unreal might be interested based on existing license restrictions, for these reasons, I am not.

Can you explain how Ultralight is fundamentally different than projects like Awesomium and libRocket? It seems very similar to your previous work and not enough of a differentiator for someone like myself. Could you tell me why I wouldn't use EAWebKit instead of this?

I spent years as a Source Engine developer and avoided both projects because of their proprietary nature, and because of lack of updates to their underlying web browser libraries.

I fear this is a repeat of Awesomium, with a similar proprietary nature, and operating in a space where we will not see frequent updates to the underlying web libraries, regardless of using a subset of web technologies that UI developers would care about.

It suppresses opinions that are not widely accepted or favorable and deters irritable tones of voice among other things.

I understand that it's going away, but I really hope they open source it. I don't expect that they will, though. I know people have decompiled it and made private servers to replicate the experience, but it'll be an icon lost with time, and you can't replicate all the exact behavior with private servers.

I thought I was in new and not the front page. You're telling me that as a demonstration of perf gains, in a graphics context I win back .8 ms in exchange for another dependency and unnecessary cognitive load?

Speak briefly and concisely.

I would not claim to have a great resume, but I have been employed. Here is an example of mine. http://www.andrewmcwatters.com/resume.pdf

Use Microsoft Word, export to .docx and .pdf.

If I were hiring a developer, I would look for the technical skills I'm looking for, relevant and extended experience, and a proven track record with references. Formal education is nice, but not necessary. Open source projects or a design portfolio they can show is a plus.

A personal and technical interview helps me determine intent and company fit.

A little bit of an overstatement. It's not uncommon to see minimum configurations in many embedded scenarios.

The problem "safe" languages have in this context is that they really truly are no better than C, for the simple sake of them throwing out performance and resource considerations from the get-go. Additionally, if you take even just a day to read up on UNIX and C history, you'd quickly find the two are essentially intertwined, and that to usurp C, you'd have to nix UNIX, too.

I've yet to see anyone with serious industry experience come out and say sane things about replacing C. It's just not going to happen. Not in my lifetime, unless someone decides to write a new operating system, and Linux subsequently loses footing.

I agree. Furthermore, it is really deceitful to use the name "Standard" when it's far from it. For years this was not the standard way of writing JavaScript. I get that standards change. However, this isn't even the way most companies write JavaScript.

The way I interpret this: some group of developers thought it would be a good idea to hijack the word "standard," and wedge this particular new style into the concept. It just isn't standard. It's as absurd as having a company called "Blue Shine" and selling only green colored cleaning products.

At least be honest about it. Call it something else, like "Colonless," since that's the most obvious thing that sticks out when using this style.

Awwwards participants have been creaming themselves since this has been released. Good to see how much progress it's made. It's certainly right there next to GSAP as a designer tool.

You stopped reading after "I used it for two weeks?" Really? How much time do developers need to waste before realizing some software is bad? A month? A quarter? A year or two?

I should be able to look at a library or framework's API examples and say "I don't want to use this," and not have to waste a second more.

The last thing the world needs is another immature SSL/TLS implementation

Here's an interesting thought: you don't become mature without starting somewhere.

I tried explaining this to my friends who work for GitHub and Facebook just shortly after they offended me by bashing and making fun of Christianity without cause (no one brought it up, or anything remotely related to religion). I don't need to name them. They read HN and know who they are.

I chose to be offended because we're amongst other friends in a Skype chat who promote this sort of thing: environments where discussions and comments that would offend people should be avoided. I'm fine with that. Who wouldn't be? The the degree they promote this to is equivalent to what's in that CoC. It's well-intentioned, as mentioned in this article.

What I'm not fine with is them being hypocrites about it. That's when I choose to be offended. I don't speak ill of anyone in that chat, but to have such "progressive" individuals claim this is the environment they want, and to selectively choose what they want to apply it to is reasonable grounds to get mad.

My problem with these codes of conduct are that the people who promote them have repeatedly persecuted me, and even went as far as to try and deface me in front of my employers.

I think the concept of it alone is fine, but the people advocating for them have been nothing but offensive to me, ironically enough. The people advocating for this haven't been peaceful, respectful individuals. They've made personal attacks on me.

No I mean, factually, it's reverse-racism. It's not an opinion, the author talks about racial issues and then makes prejudicial statements about all white people:

And White people, every single one of you, are complicit in this racism because you benefit directly from it.

every single one of you

complicit in this racism

What else is this suppose to say besides, "all white people are racists"?

Why is that okay for a black person who identifies as "Black" not black as a descriptor of skin color but Black as a part of community, a culture, not an individual, to say that all, that's all as in every man, woman, and child as a White person, not an individual, but all White people as a part of the white community, are racists?

Why is this okay? What does this accomplish? What is the end goal of this conversation the author intends to have with his audience really about?

If a message is conveyed here to the White audience, what are white individuals, and White people collectively suppose to do about it? Is the article just about saying White people are racist and that's it, rant over, end of story?

What is the solution?

[...] it’s getting harder and harder for me to think about the protection of White people’s feelings when White people don’t seem to care at all about the loss of so many Black lives

What? Are you serious?

Lets repeat that back:

White people don’t seem to care at all about the loss of so many Black lives

Excuse me? Says who?

What is there to explain? The sun shines, water flows, and racists make prejudicial statements.

I love these articles; I make sure to bookmark them just in case one day I want to build binaries that do nothing.