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Comment by _aavaa_ | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of your points, I am not sure what this has to do with the parent you're replying to.

The one part I disagree with is:

> A lot of these things do find some modest niche to survive in. But none really take over the world as originally forecast by the hype wave.

One of Blow's critique of C++ is specifically that it's trying to be the everything language. Jai's goal is to be for video game development, and that's it. Not for embedded systems, not kernels, not drivers, not high performance computing, not operating systems. Just video games.

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I was surprised to recently learn that embedded isn't on Jai's roadmap. I respect the decision re scope and feature-creep. It was surprising, given that usually languages with the performance, and low-level capabilities of C are also suited for embedded. Ie: The overlap with existing languages is almost 100% when you look at A: Languages that are fast/LL. B: Languages that are suitable for embedded. (The usual suspects of C, C++, Rust, Zig, and ADA)

I imagine that part of that is that he's a video game developer and not an embedded systems developer. I have no experience with embedded systems programming so idk how similar the two are.

But:

1) Lots of things things have high overlap with fast/LL languages.

2) I imagine there are nice returns to focusing the language on a specific use-case, even more so when the core developers are not actively using it for the other use cases (I doubt he or his team will be doing embedded work anytime soon).

It's false, he never said that it was only for games.

But the decisions made are going to be for the benefit of game development first, and everything else secondarily.

Either the word "only" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence, or you're simply wrong [0].

Yes you could program anything in the language, just like you could programming anything in any language. But he's designing the language for video game development. The whole reason he's making it is specifically for video game development, and he's been very explicit that he believes that a language should not try to be designed for use in every application.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1...

I mean this is a little pedantic. It's true he never said that only games are able to use his language as if it were some kind of law, but he did say that his language is being designed to address issues that video game developers face and that was his main, and almost exclusively his only concern.

If other domains benefit from that, he's not going to actively bar them from using his language, but he also won't give them much consideration.

It's just false, i'm in the closed beta and there are a lot of people that use it for other things than games. When they find a bug or have a suggestion he give them the same consideration as anyone.

What people use it for and what it's meant for are two different things.

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