carloscm

"The chips that produce an electric field for the Solar Probe Cup are made from tungsten, a metal with the highest known melting point of 6,192 F (3,422 C). Normally lasers are used to etch the gridlines in these chips—however due to the high melting point acid had to be used instead."

I had no idea tungsten was used to make ICs. What kind of density is achieved by laser etching (on tungsten or otherwise)?

Comment · 8 years ago

I originally did. This was fine when the scripting was just doing data setup in advance, and it wasn't being run per-frame as game logic. When I started The Spatials V3 (aka Galactology) I also started doing real time game logic in s7. After enough code it became clear that the fastest purely interpreted scheme wasn't fast enough to be put into a soft real time path (the game grew up to hundreds of systems, in the ECS sense).

So I made a 6 months long gameplay development freeze last year and I converted all the s7-flavored Scheme code into the l2l Lisp dialect with a custom transpiler (which had to be aware of all the s7-ism plus my own s7 reader macros), and replaced the C++ binding layer with sol2. This resulted in a ten-fold increase in performance when the game is limited by logic perf (it's not visible with an empty new game). LuaJIT is alien technology for all I know.

I have to do a proper write up some day.

Comment · 8 years ago

I'm beating my own drum here, but the gameplay code for my game Galactology is 90%+ done in a Lisp dialect (l2l with LuaJIT underneath), clocking at 51K lines currently. It has been a huge productivity boost since I switched from C++ two years ago, but I do miss some level of typing and static checking. http://thespatials.com/

Comment · 9 years ago

I think the article is wrong to call the showcased devices "netbooks". Netbooks were a laptop-lite, with a slightly smaller size. The Dragonbox Pyra is more like a micro laptop, the size of two big smartphones stacked on top of each other. It's a different size category and that's what makes it interesting.

Crowdfunding is bringing the netbook back salon.com

3 carloscm 9 years ago 4 comments

A love letter to s7 Scheme carloscarrasco.com

2 carloscm 10 years ago 0 comments

Prototype Production Run (DragonBox Pyra PCB) boards.openpandora.org

1 carloscm 11 years ago 0 comments

Racket v6.3 blog.racket-lang.org

7 carloscm 11 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 11 years ago

I've looked into both l2l and moonlisp and they were too incomplete to be usable in their current state, and not being worked upon recently (or not much). The most current and interesting effort in this area in my opinion is Conspire[1], which is actually based on Terra[2], another amazing piece of software.

The decision to not go with LuaJIT was complicated and depending how it goes with S7 I probably won't take it again for a new game. For starters I doubt I will delegate any per-frame non-evented computation to the S7 side, while I could easily do it in LuaJIT. But I'm already seeing an at least 10:1 ratio of lines of code for things like building GUIs, and it's only going down even further now that I'm implementing event callbacks with lambdas and adding reactive-like system for rendering updates.

Good work on hua! I read somewhere that once you learn a Lisp you are destined to write one. I've been tempted too :)

[1]: http://blog.duangle.com/2015/01/conspire-programming-environ... [2]: http://terralang.org/

Comment · 11 years ago

LuaJIT is, by far, the best option for scripting in games/RT, thanks to the incredible JIT performance and its incremental GC with deadlines.

But there's something when you start playing with Lisp and then you want to keep using it more and more. Suddenly the classic Ruby/JS/Python/Lua language design feels boring and stale (ironically, given the age of Lisp).

After getting my feet wet in v2, I'm doubling down on Scheme for The Spatials v3, this time using S7 Scheme, a true gem of an interpreter (first class environments, hook on symbol-access for reactive programming, super extensive C FFI support, etc.)