The Lobster Programming Language

github.com

55 points·mahmoudimus··4 comments

That's a very interesting and clever take on a lot of friction points with C-like languages, including the type system and the focus on brevity and expressivity.

Anyone's clocked any time with Lobster?

(This is a genuine HN front page material)

I made this thing, just noticed it was posted.. AMA.

- What are the "batteries included" in the context of graphics capability?

- Any built in GUI support / library?

- How is the speed of any lobster compiled code when compared with similar C or Python code?

And +1 for the C cheat-sheet - http://aardappel.github.io/lobster/C_style%20language%20Chea... - really helps to understand the language better!

- You can see some of the graphics features here, under "Engine": http://strlen.com/lobster/ (and new features are being added as needed).

- Yes, there's support for "Dear IMGUI" (see e.g. https://twitter.com/wvo/status/1092948776388485121) and there's also a simple GUI system written entirely in Lobster specifically for game menus/UI and such.

- Speed is still being improved, but in its compile-to-C++ mode it should be a lot closer in performance to C than Python :) It also has a "JIT" mode that goes thru libtcc, but is 3x slower. It's very fast as a game scripting language, but it does not compete with C/C++/Rust as an "engine" language just yet, you are still expected to write the absolutely most performance sensitive functions in C++ (as is the case with a lot of built-in functionality). The language has the potential to compete directly with C++ at some point, but getting there will be a lot of work.

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