These two case studies show that it is possible to create high performance games with lisps help, but is it feasible in a modern game studio?
There are problems holding it back: Firstly game developers rely on large sets of libraries from game console manufacturers and operating system developers. These libraries come with documentation and sample code which is almost entirely C or C++. In other words, by not using C/C++ you lose a lot of shared code, legacy code and code from other non-lisp studios. Secondly there are not a lot of programmers that no lisp, or that are wildly enthusiastic about learning. Thirdly, managing garbage collection and cons’ing to keep performance and memory budgets requires great knowledge of lisp. Whilst it does take some time for a C++ programmer to come up to speed, the language is a lot more raw and low level, it less often a mystery what is going on under the hood. None of these issues should prevent a lisp friendly studio from adopting lisp however, as some of the advantages of lisp are particularly advantageous to game development: Interactive and rapid development – Since the fun aspect of
Related Questions
- These two case studies show that it is possible to create high performance games with lisps help, but is it feasible in a modern game studio?
- This sounds like a very important change in the high performance computing community. What else is NERSC doing to help?
- Is it possible to create custom help text for questions?
