On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Clint Moore <clint@ivy.io> wrote:

I'm trying to remember why I last gave up on Haskell, other than the usual weirdness issues. I think because, FP purity doesn't seem relevant to game simulations? Keeping and modifying state seems to be what many games actually are.

Ok then. Nevermind.

This is the core point worth discussing, as pure vs. impure and strict vs. lazy can definitely impact certain application areas.

I did go around the block with OCaml back in the day. My issues with it were more on the practical implementation side. It had a tedious C FFI that wanted to steal bits of numerical representations for its own GC benefit, and IIRC it didn't believe in single precision floats. Those were pretty important to the memory and processing constraints of games 10 years ago, and probably still are now.

F# came along and I've looked at that more than once. I've always been struck by how lackluster the interfacing to the DirectX universe is from the .NET side of things though. First MS pretty much made a turkey of Managed DirectX. Then they shipped XNA for several years, got a fair amount of indie interest, and then abandoned it. The leading DirectX / .NET bridge is a third party library, SharpDX. SlimDX was another one but IIRC they're in remission now. Going the .NET route, you still deal with GC. I looked at some of the F# benchmarks recently and I don't remember them being all that great.

Pretty sure I looked at Haskell benchmarks too recently.

Cheers,
Brandon