Hacker News Reader

Comment by djbberko42 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who started using Elixir this year (for work) this is really cool. I have had some ideas for some SPAs and games just like these io ones and it'd be great to use Elixir for them. Do you think a top down fps io game would be plausible with this setup? There would need to be at least 60 ticks per second I'd think.

View on HN

Definitely possible. Tick rate isn't the problem, Elixir is very performant. Just the predictive elements are an issue if you're working with 2 different languages. I'd go with Gleam from the start and look into compiling to js.

Don't you lose a lot of the niceties of Elixir when switching to Gleam, just because Gleam is a younger project? LiveView would be the big one I'm thinking of. Do you see that as a worthy trade?

You can still use LiveView/Phoenix/Elixir, but have your game logic be in Gleam. I haven't used it though so I could be wrong here.

A little bit more about it here: https://katafrakt.me/2021/10/13/app-with-elixir-business-log...

You'd call Gleam code like this inside Elixir:

`:game.move(game, player_1, :left)`

And you'd receive an Elixir map `%Game{}` which you can then use in LiveView. If that makes sense.

Cool! I'm going to have to look more into Gleam. I saw it hit v1.0.0 on ElixirForum last month, but I figured it was an alternative to Elixir rather than something that played so nicely with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com