Re: Games (Re: [Caml-list] Caml productivity.)

[Chris Hecker <checker@d6.com>]

>I'm just curious: are people developing console games
>(PS2/XBox/Gamesomething) using gcc? Is it even an option?

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.

Still, you could probably port caml to PS2 Linux and play around with 
it.  On the PS2 you'd only use it on the CPU, and you'd still upload hand 
coded asm to the VUs.  Even on the more conventional machines like GC and 
Xbox, there's a lot of packing things in DMA buffers and accessing memory 
mapped registers and memory blocks, which caml is not great at.  Caml 
doesn't really have a way to take a pointer to a block of memory and cast a 
struct with heterogeneous data types onto it.  You could kind of hack this 
with bigarrays, but it'd be a mess.

You could use caml as a scripting language, but it is missing a lot of 
dynamic features that you want for game scripting, like introspection and 
coroutines.

Chris


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