Arcadia VS libpython-clj

If ECS gets too boiler-platey for my liking I might try some of the "don't use MonoBehaviours" approaches people have suggested, perhaps with F# bundled into a .dll. I also saw that some mad scientists had bridged the gap between Clojure and Unity via a framework called Arcadia - we'll see!

arcadia adds clojure (a lisp) to unity as a scripting language. You get to use a very good and well documented 3d game engine while still scripting stuff in your game in a lisp. there's a godot version too. The blender>unity/godot pipeline is pretty easy and documented. However, these game engines themselves are a lot to learn for your first game, especially if you're doing unorthodox stuff with them such as using lisp you won't find many tutorials.

Nowadays, Clojure can be used for this sort of stuff. Arcadia has been used to make real world games. Lead developer gave a talk about it a few years ago.

Clojure started out on the CLR before the decision was made to focus on the JVM instead, and some people still maintain an unofficial ClojureCLR port. Some people used that to make Arcadia, which builds on ClojureCLR to make it work in Unity. Here's an old video of someone Clojure's REPL-driven development to make on-the-fly scene changes, kind of cool.

Arcadia uses ClojureCLR to work with Clojure in unity. Also Godot engine version.

My understanding is that the Clojure community points everyone to Arcadia[0] since it's maintained and a bit more public about what their exact goals are. Unfortunately, neither are terribly well documented and so I've not personally used either

[0]: https://github.com/arcadia-unity/arcadia

It’s also worth noting that Clojure has libpython-clj (https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj) which offers an interface with Python from another lisp. Here are some advanced ML and dataviz examples using that lib: https://github.com/gigasquid/libpython-clj-examples.

Basically, you take a programming language and make it work on a platform that meant to be programmed using a different PL. Clojure is hosted by design - it's not Java, but can be used to program for JVM. It ain't Javascript, but can be used to target nodejs and browser; not an [official] CLR language, but you can write .Net programs. You can use Clojure to make Flutter apps with ClojureDart. You can integrate Python into Clojure with libpython-clj. Or write Clojure to target Erlang/OTP; or Rust; or R; There's even a clojure-like language for Lua - Fennel.

There's something about Clojure people like so much, they want it to work atop any platform.

https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS

https://github.com/scicloj/clojisr

https://fennel-lang.org

There's this project that's used a lot for taking advantage of Pythons ecosystem through Clojure JVM. https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

Ahh, makes sense. Well, if you ever wanna steal some of python's thunder, libpython-clj worked great for me lol. Supposedly py4cl fills a similar role in Common Lisp.

High quality interop with any python library via libpython-clj including, but not limited to, keras, numpy, matplotlib, and pandas. This includes zero copy paths from many of those.

libpython-clj now has Java bindings...go tell all your Java friends!