lobster
flecs
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lobster
- The Lobster Programming Language
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The Neat Programming Language
I think lobster does this.
"Compile time reference counting / lifetime analysis / borrow checker."[1]
"Reference Counting with cycle detection at exit, 95% of reference count ops removed at compile time thanks to lifetime analysis."[1]
[1] https://strlen.com/lobster/
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Why does Rust need humans to tell it how long a variable’s lifetime is?
There is another language, Lobster, that uses lifetime analysis like Rust, but IIUC infers lifetimes completely automatically. It looks like the idea is still experimental - I'm interested to see how it goes.
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What are some must have built-in modules in your opinion/experience?
I think the ability to open a window and do graphical stuff is actually pretty underrated in core language functionality. There's a few game-oriented programming languages like Lobster that put windowing and graphics in the core language functionality, and I think it's pretty neat. The biggest downside is that it's a lot to bite off, because you'll probably want to have standardized API functionality for a whole host of things like font rendering, image loading, etc.
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Minetest: An open source voxel game engine
The actual game itself, yes. Based on this open source project though which provides the language its written in and core engine tech: https://github.com/aardappel/lobster
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Plane - FOSS and self-hosted JIRA replacement. This new project has been useful for many folks, sharing it here too.
I'm keeping an eye on Lobster though. It fixes most of Python's problems. It's way faster, has proper static typing, the import system is sane, etc.
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Using a borrow checker to track mutable refs in a GCed FP language?
Lobster (https://strlen.com/lobster/) appears to at least do lifetime analysis to reduce refcounting. I'm not sure about automatic interior mutability. I feel like there's a keyword here that can help find other compilers with similar features.
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What would make you try a new language?
Also, can I introduce you to https://strlen.com/lobster/, a garbage collected language made for game development by (and primarily for) the one and only Wouter "aardappel" van Oortmerssen?
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In a custom typed imperative programming language, what should the compiler do next, after resolving variable references?
I would like to make it work to some degree like Rust with a borrow checker, and have optional static typing (with type inference wherever it can). Other sources of inspiration, lobster lang, and dart. It is going to (eventually...) compile to several places like dart (browser, iOS, android, linux, etc.). After I've created the AST, I've gone straight to code generation, because that's the easy part IME. But now have to insert the "middle" and do typechecking/borrowchecking/inference/other checking. This is for an imperative-style language.
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Features you've removed from your lang? Why did you put them in, why did you take them out?
Over the ~12 years of Lobster (https://strlen.com/lobster/) 's existence, features that were removed (in this order): * Lexical scoping. * Icon style backtracking. * Small-talk like syntax. * Dynamic Typing. * Multimethods. * Frame based state (like FRP). * Co-routines.
flecs
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ECS, Finally
I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)
I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.
I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.
If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants
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Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design
Flecs does just that: https://ajmmertens.medium.com/why-it-is-time-to-start-thinking-of-games-as-databases-e7971da33ac3
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What's your way to create an ECS?
I'm trying to optimize my workflow as much as possible, and came across this thing called an ECS. After doing a little bit more digging I found some decent guides on how you would make one, I also found one premade called FLECS. FLECS is nice and all, but I was looking for something more simple that just has the bare bones of what I need and is also configurable. I haven't been able to really find anything like that, so I was wondering if anyone had an example of maybe their way of implementing an ECS. I know how to go about it, but I'm unsure of exactly what the code would look like.
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Introducing Ecsact
Since we wanted a common game simulation that would be on both the server and the client we looked into a few libraries that would fit our ECS needs. It was decided we were going to write this common part of our game in C++, but rust was considered. C++ was a familiar language for us so naturally EnTT and flecs came up right away. I had used EnTT before, writing some small demo projects, so our choice was made based on familiarity. In order to integrate with Unity we created a small C interface to communicate between our simulation code and Unity’s C#. Here’s close to what it looked like. I removed some parts for brevity sake.
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Prolog for future AI
Repository: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs
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An in-game query engine heavily inspired by prolog
This is the project: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs (query engine implementation lives here: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/tree/master/src/addons/rules)
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What are the limits of blueprints?
There's also a performance question. While we can now use Blueprint nativization to convert Blueprints to C++ the result will be a fairly naive version, fast enough for most purposes but not if you're trying to push every bit of performance. This is where you're looking at making sure you're hitting things such as using the CPU cache as well as possible for an ECS system (Look at ENTT or Flecs if you want to see what they're about and why you'd want one), or a system needing to process massive amounts of data quickly such as the Voxel Plugin.
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What's the hot tech stack these days?
If I knew C++ and I'd heard about it before I started my current project, I would have been tempted to use this https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs which can be built to WASM. Of course you still need JavaScript in the front end to link to the WASM part. I've recently been using esbuild to bundle my front end code, which does a pretty similar job to webpack, but is a bit faster.
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Bevy and WebGPU
When do think bevy will support entity-entity relationships ? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3742.
Flecs ECS already supports this: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/blob/master/docs/Rela...
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any resources for expanding on ECS?
For a modern engine you’re probably best looking at Unity’s DOTS. You may also want to check out some of the different open source ECS libraries such as flecs and EnTT are two popular ones for C++, but there’s lots of them. Largely you’ll see lots of different approaches taken, all with their own pros and cons. Not all of them will be performant (some focus more on the design benefits) while others will be optimised for certain use cases. What you should prioritise will depend on your specific needs.
What are some alternatives?
cakelisp - Metaprogrammable, hot-reloadable, no-GC language for high perf programs (especially games), with seamless C/C++ interop
entt - Gaming meets modern C++ - a fast and reliable entity component system (ECS) and much more
treesheets - TreeSheets : Free Form Data Organizer (see strlen.com/treesheets)
JUCE - JUCE is an open-source cross-platform C++ application framework for desktop and mobile applications, including VST, VST3, AU, AUv3, LV2 and AAX audio plug-ins.
language-ext - C# functional language extensions - a base class library for functional programming
Boost - Super-project for modularized Boost
mun - Source code for the Mun language and runtime.
SDL - DEPRECATED: Official development moved to GitHub
swift - The Swift Programming Language
Folly - An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.
cligen - Nim library to infer/generate command-line-interfaces / option / argument parsing; Docs at
Seastar - High performance server-side application framework