written in lisp?
The simple answer is yes they could, in fact they have. Two of the biggest selling games ever; Nintendo’s Mario 64 and Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter both used lisp very heavily in their development. One of Naughty Dog’s MIT cofounders, Andy Gavin, wrote a language for writing video games called GOAL. GOAL’s compiler was an Allegro CL program which took GOAL source and output executable code running on the Playstation 2. By doing this and having ‘cons-less’ code that had explicit memory management rather than a garbage collector they were able to utilise the benefits of lisp whilst avoiding two of the potential performance bottlenecks. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020710/white_01.htm http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lhtml Mario 64 was created using N-World from middleware pioneers Nichemen. This tool set was created using Allegro CL. http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/nichimen.
