Alexito's World

A world of coding 💻, by Alejandro Martinez

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A programming language for Games by Jonathan Blow

I've just seen this presentation about a prototype of a programing language for games, made by Jonathan Blow (known for Brad and The Witness). I'm really curious about this kind of experiments about programming languages to see what things I'm missing on my every day job.

Now that we have Swift and, even being a good language, is receiving a lot of critiques. Not everybody knows about compiler or programming languages or can/want understand the reasons behind some decisions. But if you look out there you will see that the Swift team has done an amazing work and I can't wait to see the future of Swift.

Back again on that new programing language for games, I will like to point out some good things that I've seen.

  • The info that the compiler needs it's defined on the program itself. So there is no need for Make files or some crazy IDE features. You define what to link, what to include and the compiler options on the same main file, so it's easy to move and tweak.
  • Files are just for your convenience, for the compiler the order doesn't matter.
  • There is no preprocessor...
  • Because the compiler lets you run arbitrary code at compile time. No need for another sublanguage to process your code. You just write code that can run at compile time. Easy.
  • That gives you the opportunity to extend the compiler and check whatever you want at compile time.
  • Also the compiler does type inference, something that I still don't know if I like or not.

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