Hacker News Reader

Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the author of this language is using it for game development. What features does Beef provide that other languages don't from a performance perspective? It looks like it has a class & object style. Does it give you tools to control memory layout of those allocations for performance? I know some game devs have commented that the reason C++ classes aren't used in their entity system is memory locality & latency issues.

View on HN

There's a split between class and struct. Classes are reference types and have more 'features', and structs are a lot like C structs - you have complete control over their layout and allocation.

There's future plans to add more high-perf sugars like automating some SoA and AoSoA layouts, but you can do all that manually right now.

You should probably do some perf analysis to show how Beef performs vs C / C++ for game related tasks.

Also it would be awesome for you to make a few code samples / tutorials on how to get started with game development with Beef. I'm sure it would attract a lot of people to your language if you show some "proof" it is a nice language for gamedev!

This seems very similar to the FreePascal approach.

It's tempting to give this a go, but there are so many languages out there... Maybe I'll try a Ludum Dare in it.

> This seems very similar to the FreePascal approach.

Also identical to Swift or C# (the latter being an explicit inspiration according to TFAA comments upthread).

I guess that makes sense given the provenance of C#

Reply on news.ycombinator.com