wolf3d VS dhall

There are far better historical sources to study, such as Wolf3D, the classic BSD games, or even Word 1.1.

It took a long time to write that engine and porting the whole thing properly also takes time. It just moves goalposts. Why didn’t he spend 80M on a new AAA game? If he spent any less than that, he certainly can’t draw any useful conclusions.

Have you ever looked over the codebase? It’s plenty large enough to draw useful conclusions from for most people let alone someone with his vast game experience.

https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/tree/master/WOLFSRC

Meanwhile, you are drawing bay conclusions with no credentials out evidence. As to actual games, setting aside the fact that Wolfenstein still sees play, loads of popular games are written in JS. Lots of others are in Java or C#. None of these make your case as Haskell, Ocaml, and StandardML (SML) are in the same performance range.

As to your argument about the efficiency of objects, what do you think functional languages use? Lets use SML as an example. There’s real arrays and they are also optionally mutable (yes, there’s linked lists too, but those can be used in C++ too).

Records are basically just C structs (they are immutable by default, but can contain refs which are mutable pointers). They can contain functions because functions are first class without the mess that many languages create.

You associate functions with datatypes which gives you the best part about methods. They also give you a kind of implicit interface too due to structural typing. I’d note that closures are mathematically equivalent to objects.

Finally, modules are everything a language like Java tries to get from classes (and more), but without any of the downsides of classes themselves.

People generally like the JS paradigm of factories and object literals (even if they hate the stuff like dynamic typing or type coercion). StandardML offers the same kinds of patterns, but with sound typing, simpler syntax without the warts, more powerful syntax, and performance in the same range as go or Java.

To me, your argument sounds like the people arguing that goto is better and more natural than looping constructs or the procedural guys arguing against OOP. I think if you messed around with StandardML, it would change your mind about what programming could be in the future.

I'm not used to seeing assembly look like this. What's the wrapper stuff? Looks like C. But I thought you could inline assembly in C like here: https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/blob/master/WOLFSRC/DETECT.C

c) The source code was pretty vanilla standard C. No huge assembly. Around 36000 lines of "normal C" (at the time, most of C games were non-portable, you would get near and far pointers or assembly shenanigans you had in Wolf3d source). Only 4 assembly functions (draw a vertical line, a horizontal one, fixed point multiplication and division), and they were already replaced by 4 standard C functions.

id software used raycasting since it's early games like Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D. heck, even though Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Blood were majorly using BSP, their most simple and rustic rendering base was through raycasting.

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If you mean installing Dhall's dependencies (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...), those aren't too crazy, but they're definitely not all "beginner level". Template Haskell in particular is quite heavyweight.

Ok, lets be specific. Lets write a comment to explain this function:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...

I haven't tried it but apparently you can compile to Nix from Dhall:

> You can use this compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people who wish Nix had a type system.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

If the problem is the syntax and people wants some other format that compiles to nix, there's dhall

https://dhall-lang.org/

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

https://www.haskellforall.com/2017/01/typed-nix-programming-...

Dhall is a generic config language with some programming capabilities (but not turing complete) that can compile to json, yaml, and other formats, like in this instance nix.

For my GSoC project, I built from scratch the dhall-csv package on the Dhall Haskell implementation Github Repository. Said package provides two executables, dhall-to-csv (which converts Dhall files into CSV files) and csv-to-dhall (which converts CSV files into Dhall files). It also provides Haskell libraries with the functions that translate bidirectionally between Dhall and CSV.

> If you add constraints (like not being able to feed the program to itself as is done in the halting problem and not allowing unbounded loops) then it is possible to determine if a program will terminate or not.

Dhall is a good example - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell .

See also https://dhall-lang.org/

That just seems like an even greater nightmare to me. Soon you would have to learn to read and understand a custom program in a Turing-complete language for each and every installation.

The proper solution is a DSL, just a better DSl. Or perhaps a DSL embedded in something like dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/>, but definitely not a general-purpose programming language.

Dhall