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Comment by fjarlq | Hacker News Reader

"...converting NetHack's codebase to a new language would be very difficult (even one as similar as C++, which has many potentially relevant details that differ from C)."

I was a NetHack devteam member for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so I got to know the code pretty well... it's pretty hairy, and that may be putting it mildly.

I wish the NetHack 4 folks would reconsider and explore a complete reimplementation in a new language. Yes, it would be a much more significant project, but I think it would be the best thing for the game in the long run. And it would be a lot of fun, but I'm biased.

I wonder what language would be the best choice at this point, for such a project.

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A little while ago I listened to the RougeLike Radio podcast about NetHack. While the people on there, mostly developers of various clones, had plenty to say about the issues with NetHack, including its code, one thing they did agree on: NetHack is a game about exceptions. What makes it fun is exactly what makes the code is damn terrible; that is, every interaction between any two or more objects is a series of if/else if statements. For example, you can dip an object into another object if it's a potion, a fountain, a sink. If you dip it into a fountain, you may summon a jinni, or the fountain might dry up. If you dip a potion into another potion, you might make a new potion; or dilute the original; or bless or curse the original. Or you might create an explosion. This is a simple example with mostly straightforward rules. Things like interactions between thrown objects and their targets are more subtle but more complex. This is why I play NetHack: because the complexity makes it fun. A simpler game like 2048 can also be fun, but it's predictable. NetHack is different every time you play it.

I'm another NetHack fork developer (with UnNetHack leading a small team and with NetHack-De having a fun side project), so I also had to think about the issue of rewriting in a new language.

But this is just a huge undertaking for very little gain. You rewrite the 110K LOC of the core game engine in a new language so it works the same as before (which will be difficult because no tests) for having ... what exactly?

If you don't have years to spare, an incremental rewrite would be a viable option. But do Objective-C or C++ really look like a good choice nowadays?

Then there's also some big non-technical issue. With a rewrite in a different language you lose the connection to the old code that dates back to the 80s. It would no longer be a NetHack fork but a NetHack clone. For a fork developer who already has to fight an uphill battle as the DevTeam is dormant for 10 years but is still claiming that they are working on $NEXT_VERSION, this would be another of those arguments for "it's not the real thing, I'd rather play vanilla".

BTW, for a reimagination of NetHack that did something similar, take a look at http://www.wazhack.com/ . They weren't that exactly replicate the NetHack functionality but it at least feels close.

I was a NetHack DevTeam member for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so I got to know the code pretty well... it's pretty hairy, and that may be putting it mildly.

For the time it was written in and with the organizational structure it was developed with, I think it's surprisingly good. After all, it is still C, so it is not for the faint of heart anyway. Sure, there are things that could be better, like that monster attacking monster, monster attacking player or player attacking monster is usually coded in three different places. But for a code base of this size, it's overall not bad. I find myself cursing more often about the limitations of C than of NetHack's code itself. :)

I wonder what language would be the best choice at this point, for such a project.

Depending on what your goals are, C could still be the best choice for such a project.

If you want a program that runs on as many different systems as NetHack does, C is still hard to beat. Heck, it even works on Android and iOS.

Maybe something like Rust or Go, but we're still not there that C has been clearly superseded in all domains.

> If you don't have years to spare, an incremental rewrite would be a viable option. But do Objective-C or C++ really look like a good choice nowadays?

Anything that compiles to native modules and has a clean C FFI would work. You could encapsulate the current code into a black-box set of APIs, and then transition those APIs module-by-module from being calls into the old crufty code, to being calls into shiny new rewritten code. (This is the strategy recommended at http://laputan.org/mud/).

Go is pretty perfect for your use-case, though; it produces portable, low-ish level application code, and while it's a bit less performant than C, you don't really need every scrap of C's performance in the way an OS or a 3D game does. Besides all that, it's very easy for grumpy, staid old C developers to learn, in the same way that Plan9 is easy for grumpy, staid old Unix administrators to learn: it's all the same ideas, just streamlined for newer use-cases.

I don't think Go is the right option here, while you can call C code from Go, last time I checked it wasn't possible to call Go from C without having it called the other way around before. I'd rather suggest going for C++ (or maaybe Rust... well, not really).

The language may not be mature yet, but C code can very easily call into Rust code (and, by proxy, any language that can call into C can call Rust code).

The spaghetti is part nethack's identity, it is accretion not architecture. Part of what's fun about it is that it works at all, despite the code being so awful.

Even beyond the code, there's plenty wrong with nethack as a game: arduous inventory management, it gives the impression of being a sandbox game but it isn't really (hunger clock, inflexible ascension goal).

Rather than reform that, it'd be more straightforward to just create a new roguelike. Brogue is an example of this.

I find it interesting that you claim one of Nethack's problems is that "it gives the impression of being a sandbox game but it isn't really (hunger clock, inflexible ascension goal)".

It's never made that claim. For one, I don't think sandbox games even existed in form, and certainly not in name, in the 80's. Secondly, it has always been a rogue/hack clone, solidly in the 'roguelike' category. Most people would not associate roguelikes with sandbox games, although I might agree that more recent games like Minecraft with perma-death mode may blur the lines somewhat if your sole definition of roguelike is "can't load your game after you die."

In fact, Nethack and its brethren are more of a breath of fresh air in the current gaming world. They have one goal, and that's it. For Nethack, it's get to the bottom, grab grab Zot, get out alive. That's about as far from a sandbox game as you can get.

  > grab Zot, get out alive

Zot eh? Methinks you've been playing too much DCSS. :)

Somehow I am sick of people taking this up all the time when some project is written in C / C++.

C for example isn't really that complex language and using C++ well isn't that hard. Somehow I feel that users of the "easier" languages decide that c++ is impossible to learn before they even bother trying it.

It would be interesting to hack Lua into NetHack so that some of the game logic/AI could gradually be moved over...

py, rb... js probably.

C++ is almost equivalent of Latin today, which is kind of good and kind of sad. It takes arcane experience at scale to know which obscure traps not to fall into, making it inaccessible to casual hacking. Which is the point.... The codebase includes a cultural zeitgeist. (And fun.)

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