[HN Gopher] Langjam-Gamejam Devlog: Making a language, compiler,...
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Langjam-Gamejam Devlog: Making a language, compiler, VM and 5 games
in 52 hours
Author : suioir
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-12-21 20:44 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| citbl wrote:
| I've been amazed by this jam. It's like bigger and better every
| year (in terms of jams going deeper and deeper).
|
| I imagine we're 5 years away of "Make your own OS, language,
| compiler, VM and game in 12 minutes, 36 seconds. Extra points if
| you gave yourself a stroke."
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If you want to make a game about apple pie from scratch...
| falcor84 wrote:
| That could actually be really cool:
|
| Create a simulation of a universe with arbitrary physical
| laws, have it evolve sentient life, and submit the first
| video game they develop which matches the theme. The theme
| this year is "rotations". You have 48 hours. Go.
| homarp wrote:
| previous discussion of the jam
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097671
| cmrx64 wrote:
| A decade ago I ran several "seven hour roguelikes",
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160321153532/http://people.cla...
| is the documentation from the first one.
|
| The first year I spent six hours writing one of the first ecs
| crates in Rust and then an hour turning it into a game. lots of
| fun! you can search "7HRL" on github to find the historical
| participants not too ashamed to publicize their code at the end.
| A few dozen people enjoyed this.
| syn-nine wrote:
| author here, thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions
| you have!
|
| edit: in before anyone asks: no AI (LLMs/GenAI etc) was used at
| all in this project.
| syn-nine wrote:
| if you want to try out the Knots game that I submitted to the
| jam you can find it here:
|
| https://syn9dev.itch.io/knots
| amarant wrote:
| How pleased are you with garlang? What's the dev experience
| like with your new language? Given the time constraints I
| imagine there are a few rough edges, but it's clearly possible
| to make games ridiculously fast with it! Any language feature
| that you are particularly excited about?
| syn-nine wrote:
| Thanks! I really like how I combined the parameter stack and
| scratchpad from FORTH with the call stack from x86 style
| assembly. It makes it really easy to get multiple return
| values from functions. I also really like how lists and the
| loadat and storeat bytecodes turned out. It became a really
| elegant way to chain list indexes by pushing and popping
| addresses from the parameter stack. This was my first use of
| the scratchpad pattern and I felt like it was a very nice
| solution to returning temporarily allocated memory up the
| call chain / up scope without requiring memory management. I
| was also really pleased with how the new() keyword
| recursively deep copies something out of scratch to the heap.
|
| It could use some cleanup though as the speed of the jam left
| little time to think about doing things in a sustainable way.
| I'm not sure I like the var keyword as I typically prefer to
| be explicit about types.
|
| It really turned out pretty powerful though and I think it
| could be really useful as a library for game scripting.
| amarant wrote:
| That's really cool! Actually sounds like it could be worth
| the effort to clean it up and bring it to a stable release!
| I like the idea of a language made from the metal up with
| game dev in mind!
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(page generated 2025-12-27 23:01 UTC)