JaiPrimer VS gtoolkit

The first and most important step is having a language without statements and only expressions.

But, as Jai needs a `return` in functions, it already failed the trivial test.

https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md

Thanks, and yes, I didn't think about closures.

Talking about closures, I also don't know why Jai needs explicit capture lists. In C++ and Rust I understand the need for them, because you have various ways to pass them into the lambda, but Jai doesn't seem to care, at least in the examples at https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md....

Jonathan Blow & co will probably be busy enough trying to release Braid: Anniversary Edition this year (it will be Braid's 15th anniversary this August), and this will push the release of untitled-Sokoban-game until 2024 or later. Note also that the sokoban game is intended to promote the new programming language he is creating (https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md), so that might slow development / delay the release of the game beyond what would be expected for a normal videogame. (Ie, it's not just the sokoban game that needs to be ready for release, but also perhaps other features of the new language.)

There's quite a lot of information, just not very accessible.

https://www.twitch.tv/j_blow/videos?filter=archives&sort=tim... : this is jai's author livestreaming language development, most up-to-date

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1... : a cureated subset of twitch videos, possibly outdated info

https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md : a summary of jai based on the above curated videos, possibly outdated

The Jai language is the main competitor to C++ I feel. The compile times are insanely short, which is what slows you down the most when actually developing a game in C++ Unreal.

There has been a lot of hype about the Jai programming language (for game development), but another language that has been heavily influenced by it and has a lot of similar syntax and concepts is Odin. Here is a blow by blow comparison, Jai vs Odin.

This reminded me of Jai, the language by Jon Blow. In the Primer here: https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md, the section on Data-oriented design is relevant. Note that the bottom of the OP article mentions explicitly the games industry as caring about this; relevant given Blow's background.

Look for "Data oriented design" or "Structs of arrays".

Here's a talk on the former by Mike Acton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

On the latter, there's Jai, a new programming language for games (WIP, unpublished) by Jonathan Blow, who has been very public in documenting the process creating it, and which is centered around such concepts. There is some unofficial documentation of the ideas on SoA vs AoS and how the language can help switching between the two, e.g. here: https://pixeldroid.com/jailang/overview/Features/SOA/#/overv... and here: https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md...

Isn't that still the very thing that is done in various game engine entity component systems? Interestingly Jai language has out of box syntactic support for handling structs of arrays vs arrays of structs https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md#data-oriented-structures

Your ideas sounded very much like a mixup of Common Lisp with SLIME, Smalltalk interactivity and Unison-like storage of code in a database instead of files.

I've tried all of them, I think the closest thing I've seen to what you describe, which I also find very attractive, is the GT Smalltalk environment: https://gtoolkit.com/

Have you tried that? They call this idea "moldable development" as you can "mold" your environment to your needs.

Even though I loved it, I ended up not using it much, mostly because it's a bit too heavy to keep handy for exploration all the time when needed (it takes like 1GB of RAM even when idle!)... as I already can do most of that with emacs, which is much lighter, I just stick with it.

> This power that Smalltalk systems have where the code runs in a GUI that is also the editor/debugger/etc has deeply fascinated me recently.

Have you tried emacs?

> And I'd like to actually understand a tool that I'd have to dive into that deeply, and I think I'll never have the time to truly understand all of the VM, the classes, etc.

I've recently tried to do that myself with Smalltalk via the Glamorous Toolkit[1] (a beautiful, modern Smalltalk environment based on Pharo). Because the programming environment itself comes with a Book teaching it, you can basically just read it as a normal digital book, but with the superpower that everything is editable and interactive: you can change the book itself, every code example is runnable and you can inspect the result objects right there, change it, modify the view for it... they say it's "moldable development" because you almost literally mold the environment as you write your code and learn about the platform.

> And I'd like to be able to create applications that run without shipping the entire Smalltalk VM.

That's why even though I really enjoyed SmallTalk, I can't really see it as anything more than a curiosity. I tried using it at least for my own occasional data exploration because it has good visualisation capabilities and super easy to use HTTP client/JSON parser etc., but the system is so heavy (1GB+ of RAM) that I couldn't justify keeping it open all the time like I do with emacs, on the offchance that I might need to use it for some small task.

Anyway, perhaps that's something you might be interested in.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

I have been building a drawing and animation system in Pharo (smalltalk) for a few months, using a really neat new UI called glamorous toolkit.

Last time I tried to "hydrate" thousands of SQL rows into objects and both Pharo and the Glamorous Toolkit froze up. Maybe that is to be expected, but I've done that a million times on the JVM without any problems.

In my opinion the idea is more than direct data manipulation. It is about how we get feedback. In drawing, the medium to draw is the same medium to read. In programming, there is often a mismatch - coding on a text file, running on somewhere else, e.g. terminal, browser, remote server. If you count surrounding activities for programming, like versioning, debugging, metering and profiling, even more system is involved. We are not even touching the myriad of SaaS offering each tackling carve out a little pie out of the programming life cycle.

Back to your question, from my naive understanding, smalltalk seems to be an all in one environment. The Glamorous Toolkit [1] seems to be that environment on steroid. I have no useful experience to share though.

https://gtoolkit.com/

Wrote a review on it on the website, copypasting:

Glamorous Toolkit[1] promotes the idea of moldable development[2].

There's a talk on it: Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development.[3]

The basic idea is to have multiple views and editors for any piece of data in your system (including code). Kind of interesting, but the toolkit looks and acts more like a fancy computational notebook type of environment, but without explicitly being a computational notebook.

The site on moldable development states its difference with literate programming:

They are similar in that they both promote the use of narratives for depicting systems. However, Literate Programming offers exactly a single narrative, and that narrative is tied to the definition of the code. Through Moldable Development we recognize that we always need multiple narratives, and that those narratives must be able to address any part of the system (not only static code).

And that's a sensible viewpoint. But I still see it as an advanced version of a literate programming, all done within an interactive environment.

The focus of Glamorous Toolkit seems to be on explaining a code base or a certain part of the system via presenting it via a custom tool.

But I am not too convinced with the top-level development model / workflow it assumes for you. I guess it's too narrowly-focused / opinionated.

It's also a custom fork of Pharo, so the question of long-term stability is even more unclear than that of Pharo itself.

I can't say I can compare it to Project Mage in any meaningful way, except it's also a live environment.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

Wow, that's very interesting, never heard of it before. In the first link and they've mentioned smalltalk and I remember checking out https://gtoolkit.com which I think has some of the ideas from emacs but is implemented in smalltalk. I always wondered if gtoolkit could fundamentally offer something emacs couldn't (at the principal level) but now that you've lebaled them together, I think I know the answer is no

prolly a bit outside the mainstream but -> https://gtoolkit.com/