Jblow Talks About Rust, Jai, And More | Prime Reacts

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Hey I am sponsored by Turso, an edge database. I think they are pretty neet. Give them a try for free and if you want you can get a decent amount off (the free tier is the best (better than planetscale or any other))

[prism]

7:45 This is what Common Lisp macros are, just Lisp code running at compile time that returns Lisp code. The next benefit they have over other comp time and macro systems is that all Lisp code is already written as Lisp objects, so there's no special operations or types needed to represent code.

[DaveGomes]

Prime's love for JBlow runs deep. He not drinking the koolaid, he snortin the blowcaine

[TankorSmash]

Jonathan Blow does a lot of good interviews, I'm sure he'd love to be on here actually. He did some great interviews with No Boilerplate, and No Frauds Club.

[icemojo]

For clarity, when Jon Blow talks about "entities", he's not referencing to any sort of ECS mechanism like 98% of the time. The term "entity" is as generic of a term as the "variable" in his working style. They are just a bunch of collection of data that represent things that can exist in a game world. That's all. Don't think too hard.

[careymcmanus]

In that talk I get the impression that he actually respects rust but that it is not the right tool for for him or game design in general. I also get the impression that while he is an opinionated man willing to express those opinions that he is not mean and he is happy to hear out/encourage other opinions without belittling them.

[jhuyt-]

Regarding the "difficulty of trying stuff out", I remember watching a video where a C++ developer said he used Python for prototyping because it's easier that way. Once he found an solution he liked, he then implemented it in C++.

[gabrielerbano]

I miss the On The Metal podcast. Every guest had some amazing anedoctes and insights. Even though JBlow's interview was 3 hours long, I didn't want it to end. Every single episode was like that.

[rallokkcaz]

I love Jon and I always appreciate his opinions. He's not always right and he's not always making the best case. But he's always concise about how he feels and always brings great ideas into the conversation.

[zynot]

I'm a simple man, I see a Joblow vid, i watch.

[hkejhkm]

This argument for ease of experimentation is why I love to do first drafts in Python, if it turns out that you need more performance, rewrite it in cpp, rust, or whatever systems language. Reciently I had to build an SPI to webrtc bridge to display stats from a DSP in real time, guess what python is slow and there were some bugs I had to solve in aiortc, but in the end it helped me to understand how the whole webrtc signaling process works. Now I'll be rewriting the bridge in rust with a more solid understanding of the process.

Most of the time the python implementation is more than sufficient through, which saves me a lot of dev time.

[GiovanniCKC]

7:10 I was just actually watching a video on comptime, etc, in Zig, and, coming from C++, Zig has started to feel kind of like that smaller, beautiful language that is supposed to be struggling to get out of C++. I know it's supposed to be like a modern C, but it feels more like what C++ was supposed to be. Like for example, constexpr & consteval gets us in the realm of comptime-- that idea of a first class function -- *not a macro* -- that does compile time calculations to generate some code or some compile time variable. And then we also have the ultra easy interop with C, literally no effort apparently. And defer! Oh gosh, defer looks so nice. It just feels like the same sort of area of why Bjarne made "c with classes". The niceties just shifted from being actual literal builtin classes and polymorphism to all the zig niceties. Ya know? idk. just some thoughts..

[simivb]

Oh god, thats the second reaction to jon blows stuff that contains basically the entire buildup to a point he is making, and then just stops before he makes the point. Im dying out here, what is this

[jesse]

13:50 "Limited amount of memory" I don't know when we got to the point where to open up just a single browser window requires 400-500mb of RAM. I tried with several different browsers. It feels like **something has gone terribly wrong**. We just build 💩 on top of a foundation of more 💩.

[gevcrln]

Rewrite it in Rust unironically the best approach to writing Rust ?

[MrAbrazildo]

Smart pointers were made for allocating memory on the heap. But if this happens for "character logic"/engine, if the compiler can't transpose that memory to CPU caches, then a giant performance loss will happen.
What I use to do is to use a std::vector, which has a mostly identical syntax to an std::array or a "static_vector" (a kind of std::vector for caches). Then, if performance goes wrong, I simply change the container type - this is just 1 line of code, if aliases were created.

[kasper_]

I think a cool case for zig comptime would be parsers. You can get a type safe interface for some file format (think schemas) at compile time without codegen or code first type inference (like zod in typescript)

[decator_lol]

Paused it right before he explained how Jai's meta programming helps. It's literally written in the transcript you didn't read.

[sczoot]

ECS is actually so simple to build. The only hard part is making a decision between your components being AoS or SoA depending on your specific use cases. Fundamentally entities are just identifiers, components are just structs to hold data, and systems are the body of logic acting across all entities that possess specific combinations of components, which can be efficiently queried using bitmasking. Then in your game loop specifically in the update stage you simply update all of your systems once per tick.

[musdevfrog]

Can't wait for John to be on the stream!

[akademiacybersowa]

6:00 in C# you can use Roslyn Analyzers to do this kind of stuff (custom static code analysis). Of course it won't fulfill the exactly same role as in Jai because you're still dealing with all other stuff of C#.