Four Years of Jai (2024)

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?

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.

> as soon as something's open sourced, you're now dealing with a lot of community management work which is onerous.

This is a common misconception. You can release the source code of your software without accepting contributions.

I don't think the issue is just contributions. It's the visibility.

When you're a somewhat famous programmer releasing a long anticipated project, there's going to be a lot of eyes on that project. That's just going to come with hassle.

Having a lot of eyes on it is only a problem if you either have a self-esteem problem and so the inevitable criticism will blow you up or, you've got an ego problem and so the inevitable criticism will hurt your poor fragile ego. I think we can be sure which of these will be a problem for Jonathan "Why didn't people pay $$$ for a remaster of my old game which no longer stands out as interesting?" Blow.