> Coincidentally, this post might also help answer some questions from people who don’t really understand what is the point of Zig in light of {Go, Rust, Modula-2, Mojo, LLMs, …}.
Is that a nod to @pjmlp :D ?
358 karma · joined December 10, 2024
Is that a nod to @pjmlp :D ?
But honestly, as of today, you're probably having a better time taking a few days to work out clean C++23 guidelines for your AI agents by letting them churn through all the changes and deprecations that happened to C++ over the years, figure out good clang-tidy and clang-format rules, turn on all the compiler warnings and tell them to regularly use UBSAN, ASAN and TSAN and you're getting really close to a clean workflow similar to what Rust would give you but with the rich platform support of C++. It's just kinda sad that one has to go through so much ceremony while the Rust ecosystem gives you those things for free. But imo a well-crafted AI agent workflow gets really close here.
Mean edit: I was reading more of your comments in this post and I start to think you're a bit of bullshitter who's quite overconfident because you think AI makes you so much more productive. I say this because any seasoned game engine dev wouldn't have suggested Rust for a game engine that is supposed to compete with Godot, Unity, Unreal or whatever due to missing consoles support, but you just did, which makes me suspect that you have really shallow understanding and really, AI won't help here. You could have at least mentioned that if you only target dektop and mobile then Rust is a good choice, but you didn't. But don't get me wrong, I'm quite AI pilled as well, but I still know that some things require expert knowledge to properly steer the AI agents.
Then there's "foo if cond else bar" which is Python's kind of ternary operator and it's at least slightly contentious. One could argue if a language even needs such a construct, but at least for me, I have an easier time reading the control flow when I look at "cond ? foo : bar". It gets even worse when you nest that stuff, although that's something you shouldn't do anyway. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#conditional-e...
Also, indentation based syntax... well, it's a choice. I don't know if Lattner would have chose that in a language that he would have designed to his liking from scratch. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/reference/compound-statements/
Then there is some scoping related badness from Python that I think is really awful. In Python and Mojo (with a caveat) you can do this:
if cond:
foo = 42
print(foo)
But earlier, I was talking about a caveat in Mojo, so it's slightly less awful, because the compiler would complain in the code example above that "foo" might be uninitialized when getting to the print statement, so that's at least something nice, where the static type system prevents stupid mistakes that function-level scoping makes possible. To be fair, all the serious type checkers for Python would catch this as well.
But I hope you get the idea. Those are things I highly doubt would have made it into the language if Lattner could have designed it to his liking from scratch.
I might state the obvious here, but static typing, null-safety, being able to refactor and such things make C# much much better for bigger games. Slay the Spire 2 has been made with Godot + C# and people have already decompiled and peeked under the hood (for example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpB4-W9L4ec) and imo it shows quite well how certain patterns simply require a more powerful language than GDScript or would at least be very painful and fragile to make in GDScript.
Your workaround for shader stuttering sounds quite hilarious :D I don't mean it's bad. It seems pragmatic in a good sense. But yeah, it's those limitations that pile up when making Godot target the web...
https://friedaucg.itch.io/forge-gpu
https://github.com/FriedaUCG/SDL
Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!
Together with SpaceXAI, we're training a significantly larger model from scratch, using 10x more total compute.
With Colossus 2's million H100-equivalents and our combined data and training techniques, we expect this to be a major leap in model capability.Also, holy moly, the astroturfing.
But I'll still keep an eye on what they'll show up with in the next months. Sounds intriguing.
Already seems like a great resource to me but it's still WIP.