Arcadia VS py4cl2

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

I... recently got that working: https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2/tree/master/cffi - Yes, CFFI! Yes, passing CL array data by reference!

I ended up using a fair bit of matplotlib through college and with colleagues. I too don't want to use python, but I also don't like throwing away its libraries, and I'm too lazy to invest in other* plotting ecosystems. In effect, I use up using matplotlib through py4cl/2.

Note that it is not my aim to replace the python ecosystem; I think that is far too lofy a goal to be of any good. My original intention was to interoperate with python through py4cl/2 or the likes, but felt that one needs a Common Lisp library for "small" operations, while "large" operations can be offloaded to python libraries through py4cl/2.

Python: Blender and Panda3D (game engine used for Disney's Toontown way back when) are both scriptable with Python. I've been able to successfully call Panda from Py4CL2 (thanks digikar for the help with that), but I have not tried with Blender yet. I think it's doable.

While you are at it I may as well mention https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2

If performance is absolutely not a concern, then third option is using python libraries through py4cl/2. To put it differently, if calling python from lisp is not the bottleneck, then this is a feasible option.

py4cl2 (not py4cl!) author here. From the v2.9.0 docs:

py4cl and py4cl2 represent a fairly pragmatic example of method 1, using an OS child process to communicate back and forth with your python code. Python is fairly popular and well-enabled with libraries, so you can delegate things to python that leverage those libraries.

If you can structure your code so that data de/serialization is not a bottleneck, then you could access the python libraries using py4cl/2.