Wonkey: A cross-platform programming language | Hacker News Reader

Wonkey: A cross-platform programming language

wonkey-coders.github.io

65 pointslproven17 comments

On one hand, BlitzBasic and BlitzMax represents a key moment for me, ~15 years ago, of finally 'getting' programming - I clearly remember as a teenager, in front of a Blitz IDE, when some basic concepts clicked together, and here I am many years later a full-time indie game developer.

But on the other hand, I've watched from afar enough of the post-Blitz tool development to be skeptical of anything new. Monkey 2 and Monkey X really didn't flourish and a lot of that community get badly burnt and moved on. (Have a cursory scroll of the comments of this itch.io page[0] for a fuller account by people who were closer to the action.)

So while I'm very thankful for the good ol' days of BlitzBasic and BlitzMax that did a lot for me personally, I can't see myself trusting or touching anything else coming from the same place for quite some time.

[0] - https://blitzresearch.itch.io/monkey2

Agreed. I fell in love with blitzbasic/blitz3D, and when cross-platform blitzmax came out I jumped there as well. When monkey came out with mobile and html5 support, I thought my dream had come true. I jumped the syntax hurdles and started prototyping, but then the community started getting weird. Then one day it seemed to just stop.

For people who do not know; Monkey (the language this was forked from), like haXe, generates different languages which you pick when you compile a Monkey program. So running a Monkey program requires you to pick a language like Java, c++, js, c# etc; it will first compile Monkey to that language and then compile the code for that language to it’s runnable form.

I programmed a lot of Monkey (and haXe) when it just came out and liked it but both communities are focused on gaming frontend while I needed more focus on the serverside of gaming at a time and that became somewhat painful as I had to invent everything myself (not sure if that changed; this is a long time ago).

Both this and Haxe seem like undiscovered superpowers. What's the catch? And why the focus on game dev specifically?

They both came from gaming (Flash => haXe and Blitz+Flash => Monkey) so that's why they focus on it. haXe is really quite good these days, however the tooling is not what you expect from a modern language; more to the point (I am not sure if that is still the case but I believe it is); what you want is some kind of interpreter/debuggable language to create things in and then later compile to something to have the full experience of a modern programming language. Now debugging in haXe is just a pain, especially if you need to work in one of the slower compiling backend languages; it is a pain to work with. But I wrote fairly large codebases with both of them and I do like them. It is a bit of a shame they just don't join forces; the projects need libraries, faster compilation, an interpreter (in my opinion) and better tooling. Joining forces for projects that are more or less 'the same' would make a lot of sense.

"Wonkey is a fork of the Monkey2 programming language, developed by Mark Sibly, creator of the ‘Blitz’ range of languages (BlitzBasic, Blitz2D, Blitz3D, BlitzPlus, BlitzMax)."

This sentence is a bit confusing. Is Wonkey or Monkey2 the language from Mark Sibley? Searching for Monkey2 suggests that Monkey2 is by Sibley, and Wonkey is a fork of it by someone else.

Yes, the author of Wonkey is Christophe Tes (https://github.com/seyhajin).

Someone should probably change the title then, it’s currently describing Wonkey as “A cross-platform programming language by the creator of BlitzBasic”.

Hmm. Changed now. Thanks!

You’re welcome!

That was my mistake -- I edited the page title down to fit and did not check. My apologies.

Believe it or not, I have been paid in the past to write Monkey code. The cross platform aspect of it is clean, the platform/language/sdk is hackable and the syntax without brackets kind of make it special in terms of readability. Got a lot of fun.

Now whenever I see a new language nowdays, I look for Goroutines. No goroutines, no interest. Correct me if im wrong, the fibers arent exactly it are they? Are they yielding on io/sleeps for a starter?

Blitz Basic has always looked like fun. I've never tried doing anything nontrivial with it or any other contemporary BASIC. Maybe someday, because James Hague wrote this memorable piece: "Slumming with BASIC Programmers" https://prog21.dadgum.com/21.html

I was a teen when Blitz3D came out (to be fair, there's actually a demo sample from the Blitz3D CD with my real name on it!) Seeing all of his work [1][2] in an open-source release is amazing to see. All I have to say is that Mark Sibly has done incredible things for many years now. I'm excited to see how this progresses.

Side note: I didn't have an Amiga growing up (I had an Atari ST), so I missed the original Blitz Basic (known for instance for use in the original Worms game), but just knowing that he's still working on game design software is awesome!

If you read this Mark, Zenith says hey!

[1] https://github.com/blitz-research/

[2] https://github.com/blitz-research/blitz3d

For someone who has never written a line of code in Wonkey and has no idea what any of Monkey or Blitz are: why would I use this language? What other languages are comparable/similar, and why would (or wouldn't) I choose Wonkey over them?

Aren't most high-level programming languages cross-platform?

Monkey/Wonkey, like Haxe, generates code in different languages which is then compiled. So when you compile a Monkey program, you pick a language, like JS, C++ etc and it generates code in that language first and then compiles that language to something that runs.

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