#Gamelab2018 - Jon Blow's Design decisions on creating Jai a new language for game programmers

This talk makes Jai sound so amazing! I wish they'd release a version. Maybe they don't want to commit to a spec and then face backward compatibility issues? Maybe it's just not all there for certain parts of it, and the vision just isn't complete without those things? But by the time it's released, I fear I won't have very many productive years left! I have things I want to try to do. I can't just put those things on hold for years and years. I'll have to use some other language. I suppose I should try to find out how to apply for the closed beta.. but its seems like they probably get a lot more apps than they can process any time soon, and my app would probably "fall below the fold." Maybe Jai is more for the next generation's benefit, I guess.

I think Jon has been to very different academic circles than I have. Here everyone uses C89 in academia.

Functional programming is taught as an aside but the core of what we learnt was classic, imperative C.

Why is the language changing the syntax away from the classic C style, if it could express the same logic with the classic C style mostly? Those are always unnecessary roadblocks on adapting the language.

It has been 6 years. This project is really exciting, I really hope it will be a clean project when it gets out.

If The Witness took one minute to load, no one would be bothered. If the player has chosen to play this game, they are already on the path of suffering.

> I don't even know what job that is (a job of IDE)
yeah, what job could it be? I'm super smart and I can navigate in a legacy C++ codebase through my super cool vim/emacs program

Start throwing away the awful stuff that you grew to love - Unix, Makefiles, C++, linkers, etc.
People are animals. They can only understand so much stuff. When the society gets too complicated, a war comes along and restarts it. What Putin is doing ATM.

Either this will Blow people out of the water, or it will Blow. There's no in-between.

Have you heard the story of MSVC 6?

He has been given just one hour to give his language a chance, says that he could talk about its features and stuff for hours, and then the best thing he comes up with is basically a function returning an array on the stack. Like seriously?. Nice that it works for him, but there is a good reason why it is not implemented as a language feature in other languages. He is talking about standing on the ground while reaching to the sky, but everything he demonstrates, in any of his talks, is stomping on the ground.

"Why are people using a 30 years old language instead of mine?"

imagine not being able to beat a 30 years old language and crying about it for an hour.
The entire hour is : "I want a low level language that can do high level language stuff", good luck.

there are no INSTRUCTIONS for your CPU to do strings manipulation nor list sorting, ofc you would need a library for it, I am not sure blow's understand the GOALS for high and low level languages.

Edit : The guy is also playing the wording game a lot , notice : (We don't need IDEs and all of that... then at the end of lecture ... (We will have an IDE-LIKE software that will do all of that)

I just feel like he gives off the vibes of if you want to make a 2d platformer with a unique gimmick you should fuck off and do something worthwhile, not necessarily from this video, just his general persona

A lot of people think Data-oriented design and languages like Jai are only useful in the game industry where the performance aspect is commonly, appreciated, acknowledged and even expected by end-users. But I still think enterprises could benefit from revolutions like these as well. Web development (Javascript, Typescript, Python, PHP and Ruby) and Java/C# are really terrible languages for performance, and so much stuff tries to trap people into building many layers of abstraction that become very hard to manage. But performance matters for economics and often to users (especially when features match competitors'). What's needed is productive languages that has a low skill floor to outperform the standards today.

So, zero-cost abstractions? Yay!

This guy is op.

The bit about climbing to heaven reminded me about a Carl Jung quote (I'm paraphrasing here): "The tree that reaches the heavens has roots that reach into hell."

>wants to improve programmer quality of life
>adds ; terminator to his language
top troll

I’m not going back to vi or emacs so IDEs must be doing something worthwhile.

Why doesn’t he just use holy c??

i tryied to increase volume like 100 times while watching this video

Faster than C++ ? Runtime or compile time? With C++ Modules or without (they can improve everything 10-50x time)

Still nothing released 4 years later.

Can I just look at the presentation screen

Not true that they are ‘slow languages’ … sounds good and fancy to say, but plain untrue these days. 100 times slower … sorry budy… I admire your work, but this is only in your dream: the is a difference between ‘sometimes xxx’ and ‘systematically xxx’

My 87 year old professor is leas boring than this guy.

can't wait to try it out.

"It's the thing that knows what files are in the project" hahaha

"IDE is a giant piece of junk" , that's what i wanted to hear.

I can see running code at compile time that extends the compiler getting abused.

Why do they pan away from the slides? Even when he is pointing and mentioning something that is in the slides?
I caught myself pausing and step framing to see if I could see what he was talking about

So has the compiler been publicly available yet?

This guy knows his stuff. He's not just some Joe Blow......... On second thought I bet he hears some variation of that joke every day.

I want to use this language already.

If you take The Science out of science, more people will pretend to know how to use it.

Audio level is not OK.

C++ projects only take forever to compile because people abuse classes. When you only include the things that you need and don't abuse templates, it's pretty damn fast.

Jon has an uncle whose name is Job.

That meta programming stuff during build (talking to compiler, adding code etc.) is very similar to what Microsoft recently added to C# as Source Generators. I know that it's not a new concept, but the implementation and theory is very similar, so I wonder if they got inspired by Jon on this.

Wauw, I had to check , I loaded up the witness and holy shit, the game loads INSANELY quickly compared to games of a similar size... He really does care about quality of life for both programmer and user!

The part about program icons kinda surprised me. I write a tiny command line program under Linux which I cross compile to Windows and I add a program icon just for fun. It's not hard. I compile several .png files to an .ico file using ImageMagick and then use the mingw Windows resource compiler to compile a tiny hand written .rc file (23 LOC) that references the .ico file to an .obj file and then compile that in with all the other object files to the final binary. All in one simple Makefile (251 LOC, but doing a lot more than what I just said, including having configurations to cross compile to win32, win64, and 32bit/64bit Linux).

So that's more complicated when actually doing it on Windows using the official tools? o_O

So in other words there's a lot of hastily built bad traditional stuff getting in people's way but everyone's just so used to it that most don't care.

Why would forcing all functions to silently pass a context struct pointer be preferable to just letting the functions that need it access it via a thread-local variable?

This will come out and people will abuse the hell out of the language in exactly the ways Blow bemoans, except way worse because the base usage is faster ;)
His ideas are interesting, but only apply to the very skilled. A lot of the "bloat" in languages is about reducing cognitive load, often at the expense of runtime speed.
This argument kinda falls flat regarding build systems though. That Jai build interface looks amazing.

Blow's Language: Takes 4 years to complete.
My Language: Takes 4 weeks to write - still incomplete, but usable.

I wonder why some languages are so different...

I'm not even a game developer, but htis language sounds awesome (coming form a JS dev)