I'm blown away by the completeness of this. The IDE is extremely full featured, albeit a little weird in places (eg scrolling with my laptop touchpad basically doesn't work). Love the Windows installer. But wow, go to definition, refactorings, debugger with great UX, callstack, etc.
Also love the example game. It's written so cleanly that I learned a thing or two about 2d gamedev just from scrolling through the code.
I love the little pragmatisms in the language, eg:
for (let entity in gGameApp.mEntities)
{
if (let enemy = entity as Enemy)
{
// .. do something with each enemy
}
}
That if/let/as combo there is something I'd have loved to have in many languages.
Also hats off for switch/case without break. Finally! I also love how you're mixing C/C++ "global enum value names" convenience with namespaced safety:
public static Result<(char32, int32)> TryDecode(char8* buf, int bufSize)
{
...
return .Err;
// not Result.Err, because the return type is given in the signature
}
I know that these little syntactical things are not the key challenges of language design, but obviously they're the first things I see, and I like the amount of attention you've given them. You really only have the opportunity to get them right at the very beginning.
I think the docs are a little sparse still (but that can be expected, of course). Eg:
- I found it hard to parse this:
public Random mRand = new Random() ~ delete _;
There's docs about it here
https://www.beeflang.org/docs/language-guide/datatypes/initi..., but the "delete _" part isn't really explained. What's that underscore? I can infer that it probably means "this value", but I can't find it back.
I love that you made it easy to destruct fields like that, right there in the initializer expression, btw. Will probably kill the need for 90% of destructor methods out there.
- Apparently this converts floats to ints:
(.)(mX - entity.mX)
Or at least it does in HeroBullet.bf:15. I'm thinking maybe this does something similar as `.Err`, in that the dot makes it cast to whatever the expected type is in the function being called? I'm not sure though, it looks like a super powerful feature, maybe :-)
Finally, I believe .bf is also used for that other super convenient and performant language, Brainfuck. I doubt that causes any practical problems, but then again, why not just .beef?
Also love the example game. It's written so cleanly that I learned a thing or two about 2d gamedev just from scrolling through the code.
I love the little pragmatisms in the language, eg:
That if/let/as combo there is something I'd have loved to have in many languages.Also hats off for switch/case without break. Finally! I also love how you're mixing C/C++ "global enum value names" convenience with namespaced safety:
I know that these little syntactical things are not the key challenges of language design, but obviously they're the first things I see, and I like the amount of attention you've given them. You really only have the opportunity to get them right at the very beginning.I think the docs are a little sparse still (but that can be expected, of course). Eg:
- I found it hard to parse this:
There's docs about it here https://www.beeflang.org/docs/language-guide/datatypes/initi..., but the "delete _" part isn't really explained. What's that underscore? I can infer that it probably means "this value", but I can't find it back.I love that you made it easy to destruct fields like that, right there in the initializer expression, btw. Will probably kill the need for 90% of destructor methods out there.
- Apparently this converts floats to ints:
Or at least it does in HeroBullet.bf:15. I'm thinking maybe this does something similar as `.Err`, in that the dot makes it cast to whatever the expected type is in the function being called? I'm not sure though, it looks like a super powerful feature, maybe :-)Finally, I believe .bf is also used for that other super convenient and performant language, Brainfuck. I doubt that causes any practical problems, but then again, why not just .beef?