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Four Years of Jai (2024)

(smarimccarthy.is)
166 points xixixao | 1 comments | 15 Apr 25 23:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sph ◴[18 Apr 25 09:07 UTC] No.43726312[source]▶
Surprising deep and level headed analysis. Jai intrigues me a lot, but my cantankerous opinion is that I will not waste my energy learning a closed source language; this ain’t the 90s any more.

I am perfectly fine for it to remain a closed alpha while Jonathan irons out the design and enacts his vision, but I hope its source gets released or forked as free software eventually.

What I am curious about, which is how I evaluate any systems programming language, is how easy it is to write a kernel with Jai. Do I have access to an asm keyword, or can I easily link assembly files? Do I have access to the linker phase to customize the layout of the ELF file? Does it need a runtime to work? Can I disable the standard library?

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mjburgess ◴[18 Apr 25 09:14 UTC] No.43726339[source]▶
Iirc, pretty sure jblow has said he's open sourcing it. I think the rough timeline is: release game within the year, then the language (closed-source), then open source it.

Tbh, I think a lot of open source projects should consider following a similar strategy --- as soon as something's open sourced, you're now dealing with a lot of community management work which is onerous.

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1. sph ◴[18 Apr 25 09:22 UTC] No.43726379[source]▶
That’s what I meant by forked. If Jonathan wants to keep his branch closed source, that’s fine, as long as he cuts a release, gives it a GNU license and calls it OpenJai or something. He doesn’t have to deal with the community, somebody will do that for him.