JAI Primer: A Programming Language for Games

<i>As of this writing there are no public compilers for Jai, so all information in this text is collated from Jon Blow&#x27;s YouTube videos. </i><p>Until the language is actually released, at least in an alpha version, writing a tutorial is just speculation. Anything can change in the actual language implementation.<p>That being said, the author initiative is laudable if you don&#x27;t want to watch a few hours of Youtube videos.

Rule of thumb for doing a programming language: Write the debugger first. Or at least, very, very early. This will inform you of poor choices you&#x27;ve made, and you&#x27;re going to need a debugger anyway.

I love the idea of seamlessly switching between AoS and SoA for data types.

The #run directive addresses some major pain points for me. Is there anything analogous in other languages?

I&#x27;m excited for Jai, and if it ever makes it out into the world I look forward to building some games with it.<p>However, I just see C++ continuing to get better and better for games programming. The recent appearance of the Core Guidelines [1] (and the eventual codified form for compilers) will be a huge leap. I wish we had full #run-type control over the compile phase, but full constexpr support is a step of the way there.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isocpp&#x2F;CppCoreGuidelines&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CppCoreGuidelines.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isocpp&#x2F;CppCoreGuidelines&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CppC...</a>

Aside from the aos&#x2F;soa I feel like Rust hits a lot of the same points.<p>Nice to see #run similar to elixir macros.

Watching him occasionally stream his sessions shows me that what he is doing is just funzies.<p>His tooling is so far behind anything all other languages have that I would never bother to learn this language, because it was &quot;for games.&quot;<p>If I wanted to make a game I would learn any engine using any number of language bindings.