Making Games in Lisp with Hypergiant and Chicken Scheme (opens in new tab)

(alex-charlton.com)

155 pointsbananicorn7y ago22 comments

22 comments

13 comments · 6 top-level

Koshkin7y ago· 4 in thread

A nice thing about Lisp (that is harder to achieve in other languages) is that you can make the text of your program look like it is written in a declarative rather than in an imperative (or a functional) language. (I think that's what is meant when they say that Lisp is perfect for creating DSLs.)

sifoobar7y ago

Harder in other languages except Forth. While creating DSLs is easy enough in Lisp, Forth is more of a DSL construction kit than a programming language. Which is why there are roughly as many dialects as implementations.

jacobush7y ago

Forth... so alluring, yet so scary. I am afraid doing it will make me do great things no one else can understand and maintain. :)

2 more replies

armitron7y ago

This was posted today, illustrating the power of Common Lisp read macros (not to be confused with regular macros):

https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax

sitkack7y ago

Gambit Scheme has SIX (Scheme Infix eXtension) for C style imperative code.

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/doc/gambit.html#Scheme-i...

eggy7y ago· 3 in thread

I wish Chicken Scheme could be ported to Windows without the Posix dependencies. I run it on my Linux box, but unfortunately, work is all Windows. I have had years of frustration with Cygwin and MinGW or MSYS to run such things. I use Red [1] now, which is homoiconic like Lisp, has a great parser, and runs on all platforms with an executable under 1 MB.

[1] https://www.red-lang.org/

e12e7y ago

You use Red? Not just play with it? Could you share some details?

As for posix subsystems on windows, they're indeed painful. But the new Linux emulation layer is quite good - in some cases it might be a viable option.

eggy7y ago

Use for me is writing small utilities for work. I am not a programmer, but I work in entertainment engineering, and Red has proven useful for making all sorts of utilities to get my job done. I am currently trying to use Red to create the GUI and glue some other utilities I use together. I hope to get better at it to create full applications. Amazing for its size, and I've always loved Lisp and Forth.

bananicornOP7y ago

Wait, does the Red gui work under linux now? According to their Roadmap it doesn't yet - but maybe it just hasn't been updated for the last half year...

merlincorey7y ago

I love Chicken Scheme, so this is great to see. Note that this article is from 2015.

Chicken Scheme recently received a version 5 release, so please be aware that this article focuses on Chicken 4, as I do not believe Hypergiant has been ported to Chicken 5 yet.

As an aside, it's a shame the footnotes render over the text for me in Firefox.

zachcarter7y ago

I checked out hypergiant / chicken scheme a year or so ago - and was unable to get certain examples compiling / running on macOS.

While I'd love to play more with / learn more scheme - it's too niche of a language these days even for me (someone that writes a lot of Nim).

The scheme community seems to be very small to begin with, and then you factor in all the implementations - it's worse than the Common Lisp scene.

I do love the simplicity of the language and how elegant scheme code can look - and chicken / guile seem to be very well suited for game development.

I feel like I'd be trading a larger community for a smaller one at this point - and that's saying something, coming from a Nim user.

potta_coffee7y ago

I've been using Chicken Scheme a lot and I find it to be awesome. I wish Hypergiant was supported in version 5.

1 more reply

kwccoin7y ago

Surprise to see a Go board displayed. But given Alpha Go, is Lisp is still relevant or is there a way for chicken to call say leela zero?

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