From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id PAA18137; Sun, 28 Jul 2002 15:40:44 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA18086 for ; Sun, 28 Jul 2002 15:40:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from cmailg1.svr.pol.co.uk (cmailg1.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.195.171]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g6SDecX21550 for ; Sun, 28 Jul 2002 15:40:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from modem-74.carnivore.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.81.202] helo=mimbi) by cmailg1.svr.pol.co.uk with smtp (Exim 3.35 #1) id 17YoHl-0001rA-00; Sun, 28 Jul 2002 14:40:38 +0100 Message-ID: <005401c2363d$50206340$890bfea9@mimbi> From: "Jonathan Coupe" To: Cc: "Chris Hecker" References: <4.3.2.7.2.20020724200626.028a9d90@mail.d6.com> Subject: Re: Games (Re: [Caml-list] Caml productivity.) Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 14:45:50 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk > If you're talking about professional quality games using caml as the main > language (as opposed to as a scripting language), it's not really an option > on this generation of consoles. Memory in a commercial console game is > tightly managed, and caml doesn't give much control over memory management > at all. Even on a PC, I would have thought that the GC might need some re-writing? I haven't seen any suggestion in the docs that it's compatible with realtime requirements, ie preventing long periods of garbage collection. That said, people ship games with bigger bugs. The main thing I've taken from OCaml is using a mixed object/functional style with C++ in games. This works well enough so that we'll probably spend some money later this year using OpenC++ (an advanced preprocessor developed at Xerox) to add closures on top of the C++ compilers we use. Finally, although it is a fine language I don't think that OCaml supports the right feature mix for game programming. The combination of a more sophisticated ObjectiveC language (reflection for modules on top of a C style base language, but with Smalltalk debugger and workspace, and C's syntactical faults removed), an object library like Unrealscript's and reasonable support for FP would seem optimum. I'd insist that it be easier to parse than C++, even at the cost of removing a lot of syntactical sugar - that way I might actually get a compiler that matches the language spec, which still hasn't happened with C++. - Jonathan Coupe ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners