[racket] Lisp game development on Reddit

I made the example from the free chapter (ch 8, the Hunt the Wumpus 
game) work in Racket last week by writing macros and function 
definitions to get the LISP code running under Racket with minimal 
modifications.  I haven't gotten to rewriting it in Universe yet, but I 
did wonder if it would have been an easier endeavor (since I didn't know 
much about LISP, so I spent lots of time hunting down nil vs false 
errors and similar things).  Still, I thought it was cool to have a 
partial LISP->Racket environment working.

I definitely agree that this kind of thing can be helpful for 
encouraging Racket game development.  I also note that the games in the 
Collects help with this too, as I poked around in the Cat game once to 
learn h2dp/world and submitted a small patch for it while I was at it.

BTW, what level of game are we talking about? Once we try to get to 
commercial 3D games, we'll meet resistance on the performance side.  
Someone I know once stated a "master plan" to get Racket up to handling 
this.  The plan includes the following:
- compiler optimizations, including Blake and Jay's demodularizar + 
full-program optimization and use of Matt Might's CFA techniques.
- improvements to the garbage collector (can't have the game taking long 
pauses for this, so an incremental gc would be better)
- possibly connecting to OpenCL to run a physics engine
- anything that gives improved graphics, physics, AI, and computation 
libraries
- Typed Racket, to produce faster code without corrupting the 
implementation with unsafe calls everywhere

I'm watching this too, because I'd much rather use Racket in a 
professional setting than several other languages I can think of ...

Thanks,
-Everett

On 11/08/2010 08:38 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> We should start with a Racket version for Land of Lisp.
> It would be much nicer in the Universe world than in an
> old Lisp world.
>
>
> On Nov 8, 2010, at 8:45 PM, mike at goblin.punk.net wrote:
>
>> Reddit recently created a section for "Lisp game development".
>> There's not very much there yet, but it might be a good place to
>> promote/discuss Racket's Universe.
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/lispgamedev/
>> _________________________________________________
>>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>> http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
> _________________________________________________
>    For list-related administrative tasks:
> http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users


On 11/08/2010 08:38 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> We should start with a Racket version for Land of Lisp.
> It would be much nicer in the Universe world than in an
> old Lisp world.
>
>
> On Nov 8, 2010, at 8:45 PM, mike at goblin.punk.net wrote:
>
>    
>> Reddit recently created a section for "Lisp game development".
>> There's not very much there yet, but it might be a good place to
>> promote/discuss Racket's Universe.
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/lispgamedev/
>> _________________________________________________
>>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>>   http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
>>      
> _________________________________________________
>    For list-related administrative tasks:
>    http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
>    
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20101109/189c6aa2/attachment.html>