gamedevlists-general

[GD-General] Ruby opinions

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

The fun continues as I try to bring up interesting topics without allowing 
the threads to devolve into flame fests =)

So after much deliberation of Obj-C and Eiffel, someone on Yet Another 
Mailing List (cocoa-dev) said "Hey, why not use Ruby?!"  I've always 
considered Ruby more of a scripting language than a "real" development 
language, based on the overviews I've seen of it.  For writing a high 
performance server project, I think the orders of magnitude difference in 
performance between your typical compiled language and your typical 
interpreted language are pretty important.  If one language is 2x faster, 
hey, I can work around that -- but 100x faster is a bit much.

The only other scripting language I've looked at (and liked...for some 
reason Python doesn't do it for me) is Lua, which I happen to like a 
lot.  My complaints about Lua are that it's a moving target to some extent 
and there is a massive lack of information on it (no books, a couple 
references, and some open source projects).  Learning it is difficult 
because you basically have to learn by example and/or rely on the help of 
the many helpful people on the Lua mailing list (including lots of other 
game developers).

So, opinions on Ruby (specifically compared to other popular scripting 
languages)?

I've already integrated Lua into one project as an extension language and I 
do happen to like it quite a bit.  I haven't thought about writing an 
entire application in Lua or Ruby.

Oh, and if anyone has opinions on BETA or OCaml, I'm all ears =)

Brian

[GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Brian Hook wrote:

> Oh, and if anyone has opinions on BETA or OCaml, I'm all ears =)

Sure, I'll be an OCaml advocate for you.  I've been using it for years and
feel I had a good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Here are
some high-level points:

  - Excellent performance of runtime code and garbage collector
  - Unifies many programming paradigms in a single language:
      object-oriented, functional, traditional imperative
  - Compilation times are fast and provide good diagnostic feedback
  - Code is very portable between Windows and Unix
  - Debugger supports replay functionality
  - More 3rd party libraries than similar languages (e.g. Haskell/Clean)
  - Powerful type-inference mechanism eliminating the need for most
    type annotations
  - Strict type-checker to catch many errors at compile time

Some specific points about the language:

  - First class functions - kind of like inner classes in Java but
    syntax is very lightweight and easy to use
  - Support for parametric polymorphism (extensional polymorphism
    is in the works)
  - Easy to define new data types and operate on them via pattern matching
    (a generalized case statement that allows arbitralily deep
    introspection)
  - Exceptions
  - Sophisticated module system including functors (a simple lamba
    calculus on modules to support paramterization)
  - OO framework with support for multiple inheritance, binary methods,
    and functional updates

I'm not particularly interested in entering a debate over which language
is better -- that's very much a personal choice.  Personally, I have a
strong mathematical background and appreciate formalism and notation.
For that reason, Haskell is in many ways a more attractive language to me.
However, OCaml still remains my language of choice for any serious
development work.

Patrick Doane

Re: [GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Kent Q. <ken...@co...>]

At GDC last year, Chris Hecker raved about OCaml. One of the people who
works here heard it and has been suggesting for a while now that we look
at it.

After poking around several language comparison pages for a while, I'm a
bit amazed. It appears to be as fast and easy to write as say, Python,
the native compiler performance is consistently at the top of every
benchmark I've seen, plus there are implementations for PC, Mac, and
Unix. 

It looks a bit light on the library side, but it may prove to be a very
useful tools language and perhaps even a delivery language.

I've just downloaded a version and will start tinkering on my vacation.
I'll let you know in a week or so. ;-)

       Kent

Patrick M Doane wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Brian Hook wrote:
> 
> > Oh, and if anyone has opinions on BETA or OCaml, I'm all ears =)
> 
> Sure, I'll be an OCaml advocate for you.  I've been using it for years and
> feel I had a good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Here are
> some high-level points:
> 
>   - Excellent performance of runtime code and garbage collector
>   - Unifies many programming paradigms in a single language:
>       object-oriented, functional, traditional imperative
>   - Compilation times are fast and provide good diagnostic feedback
>   - Code is very portable between Windows and Unix
>   - Debugger supports replay functionality
>   - More 3rd party libraries than similar languages (e.g. Haskell/Clean)
>   - Powerful type-inference mechanism eliminating the need for most
>     type annotations
>   - Strict type-checker to catch many errors at compile time
> 
> Some specific points about the language:
> 
>   - First class functions - kind of like inner classes in Java but
>     syntax is very lightweight and easy to use
>   - Support for parametric polymorphism (extensional polymorphism
>     is in the works)
>   - Easy to define new data types and operate on them via pattern matching
>     (a generalized case statement that allows arbitralily deep
>     introspection)
>   - Exceptions
>   - Sophisticated module system including functors (a simple lamba
>     calculus on modules to support paramterization)
>   - OO framework with support for multiple inheritance, binary methods,
>     and functional updates
> 
> I'm not particularly interested in entering a debate over which language
> is better -- that's very much a personal choice.  Personally, I have a
> strong mathematical background and appreciate formalism and notation.
> For that reason, Haskell is in many ways a more attractive language to me.
> However, OCaml still remains my language of choice for any serious
> development work.
> 
> Patrick Doane
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Gamedevlists-general mailing list
> Gam...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general

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Re: [GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

To provide a more objective viewpoint on OCaml, here are some thoughts I
have on how I think it can be improved:

  - more bindings to native os libraries
  - lack of an IDE
      (two recent developments are working on this, one native OCaml
       development and another that leverages VC++)
  - OCaml byte-code can't run OCaml native-code easily
      (the reverse is possible with a slight performance hit)
  - no debugger support for native-code
  - needs better package management support
  - improved standard library with more consistent APIs
      (the Caml team is really good about backwards compatibility which
       makes progress in this area unlikely)
  - more documentation/tutorials
  - some form of operator overloading to at least deal with
    floating point and integer operations
      (Jun Furuse is working on an extensional polymorphism extension
       that would solve this and much more)
  - some syntax rules from a historical perspective can be confusing
      (camlp4 solves this nicely, and version 3.04 allows syntax
       extensions to be used in the top-level interpreter.
       Users can use a wide variety of syntax options and extend
       the language with new keywords and constructs)

On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Kent Quirk wrote:

> It looks a bit light on the library side, but it may prove to be a very
> useful tools language and perhaps even a delivery language.

Please let the community know what libraries and tools you need to make it
a success.

> I've just downloaded a version and will start tinkering on my vacation.
> I'll let you know in a week or so. ;-)

Sounds good - I'll be interested to hear your opinions.

Patrick

Re: [GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Dec 24, 2001 at 01:58 -0500, Patrick M Doane wrote:
> To provide a more objective viewpoint on OCaml, here are some thoughts I
> have on how I think it can be improved:
> 
>   - more bindings to native os libraries

This is a big practical problem with everything other than C/C++.
I've done some messing around with binding Lua to C-based APIs, and
found SWIG to be pretty good, but it's still not as easy as "#include
<libraryheader.h>".

I'm also trying to learn OCaml.  It's tough going so far -- almost
nothing about it is intuitive to me.  But it has all the right
marketing bullet-points, so I'm plugging away.

Actually, one thing that bothers me is lack of a native 32-bit float
type.  floats in OCaml are 64-bit.  I think that will need to get
fixed at some point.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...>
http://tulrich.com