[Seattle] Fwd: Seattle CL People?

[Brandon Van Every]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Clint Moore <clint at ivy.io> wrote:

>
> > "Technical merit" doesn't get very far in the social world.
>
>   And no amount of me standing with my fist in the air (other hand
> possibly steadying myself with a cane) and yelling "But it should, damnit!"
> is going to change that.
>

I've given up.  Really.  My last round of trying to figure out whether
someone else's language was worth something, was a tour of Julia, Clojure,
Rust, and Scala.

Julia is LLVM based and claims a lot of stuff, but when you dig down you
realize they don't have incremental garbage collection yet.  They just have
"stop the world" garbage collection which is totally inappropriate for soft
realtime systems, i.e. games.  Their target market is to replace Fortran
and Matlab.  They can get away with offline batch processes where only
"throughput overall" matters, latency at the moment doesn't.  So they can
make all kinds of performance claims, but my real world problems don't
currently match their real world problems, and nothing says they ever have
to get there.  I'll keep my eye on it, but I'm not expecting them to
deliver in a timeframe that matters to me.  It's a young language.

Rust is LLVM based as well.  I can't remember my specific objections to it,
although I know I've written them down somewhere.  My impression is that
it's pretty "early days" for the language.

Clojure is a lisp on top of the JVM.  I'm a performance oriented guy.
Apparently in their culture, if they want something to go fast, they throw
it over the fence to Java.  Which isn't saying that much.  I just don't
expect them to ever embrace my game developer concerns.

Scala is a FP language on top of the JVM, with more concern for
performance.  It's also more mature, it's been around longer.  I don't
think I either rejected or accepted it.  My issues were compounded by me
ditching Linux after a 3 year experiment and going back to Windows.
"What's going to play well with MSVC and DirectX?" became noteworthy
issues, and I don't remember the Scala ecology providing good answers.

YMMV per what you actually need your language for.

The game industry pretty much stagnated in C++.  C++ has added some
features over time, which also adds complexity to an already too complex
language.  I'm simply not a fan.  Could also be that growth in the gaming
industry has been in the mobile space, a segment I hate for its wimpy
devices, small screens, and short attention span players.  I'm a desktop
gamer.  Anyways I think the lack of any serious need of resources in the
mobile space, has probably meant people can implement those kinds of games
in "whatever" and don't really have to think about performance.


Cheers,
Brandon
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