Ideas about a new programming language for games

May 23, 2021

Jonathan Blow’s 2014 talk. He’s by now advanced to a beta for the language he started designing way back. Focuses on applications for gaming (i.e. efficiency).

Alternatives to C++: Go is good, but GC’d and wrong concurrency model for games. D has optional GC, but too close to C++? Maybe some other reasons. Rust is new, no GC but too concerned with safety (not a primary for games).

Making a language (parsing/converting to bytecode) is “easy”. Optimizing and generating machine code for multiple target platforms is hard. Apparently can leverage LLVM for that.

LLVM is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.

His philosophy: don’t optimize for bad programmers. Start with C, design for 85% of cases. Software is expensive; optimize for completion cost.

Memory-focused language

RAII was created to deal with exceptions, but it’s crap because “resource” is a bad abstraction. Memory is the only resource that matters. File handles, textures, etc. rarely an issue.

What does my program do besides fill memory? I don’t even know. That’s its main purpose. @36:34

Exceptions and RAII make your job harder. “Go does it right: error codes, multiple return values”. [I kinda agree with that. Just pattern match, no?]

Use pointers within unsafe blocks.

Ideas

Suggestion: C++11 but enhanced.

struct PartyMember {
  char *! name = NULL; // "I own this memory"
  int health_max = 4;
  int current_level = 1;
}

Compiler can statically reason about where double frees occur. Why not std::unique_ptr? Biggest complaint seems to be: ugly.

Dereferencing freed memory: 0xfeeefeee up until now, but debugger can also reason about this (similar: 0xcdcdcdcd, 0xcccccccc). @59m19s

Meshes are usually allocated on the heap. Implicit destructor and joint makes construction part of the type system:

struct Mesh {
  Vector3 []! positions;
  // Belongs to the same block of memory as vec3
  int []! indices; @joint positions
}

In C this code is scary. Not anymore. @1h13m19s

List of other features

No goddamn header files.
Refactorability - no more -> vs. ., follow Go’s syntax
Haha, criticisms about C++ lambda syntax: “don’t get me started”
Optionals, e.g. Entity ?a. Doesn’t think Swift’s a?.x is necessary.
Make concurrency less crazy @1h21m02s

The older the code is, the more likely it is that it calls some function that calls some function that calls a macro that uses some piece of global state.
Fewer / no implicit type conversions? (Go’s model)
Named argument passing

Introspection and serialization, maybe w/ version syntax:

struct Entity_Substance { @version 37
Vector4 scale_color = Vector4(1,1,1,1); @15
}

The program specifies how to build it. Language spec says the compiler just does everything: compiling, linking, etc.
Better preprocessor (use same lang for compile-time and runtime statements)
- metaprogramming?

Q&A @1h34m28s

Also some interesting things, didn’t follow that much.