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Four Years of Jai (2024)

(smarimccarthy.is)
166 points xixixao | 2 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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xigoi ◴[18 Apr 25 09:18 UTC] No.43726361[source]▶
> 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.

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chii ◴[18 Apr 25 09:51 UTC] No.43726493[source]▶
> without accepting contributions.

it's not even contributions, but that other people might start asking for features, discuss direction independently (which is fine, but jblow has been on the record saying that he doesn't want even the distraction of such).

The current idea of doing jai closed sourced is to control the type of people who would be able to alpha test it - people who would be capable of overlooking the jank, but would have feedback for fundamental issues that aren't related to polish. They would also be capable of accepting alpha level completeness of the librries, and be capable of dissecting a compiler bug from their own bug or misuse of a feature etc.

You can't get any of these level of control if the source is opened.

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lifthrasiir ◴[18 Apr 25 10:00 UTC] No.43726534[source]▶
You can simply ignore them. This worked for many smaller programming languages so far, and there exist enough open source softwares that are still governed entirely by a small group of developers. The closedness of Jai simply means that Blow doesn't understand this aspect of open source.
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1. globnomulous ◴[19 Apr 25 06:26 UTC] No.43734631[source]▶
Ignoring people is by itself tedious and onerous. Knowing what I do about him and his work, and having spent some time watching his streams, I can say with certainly that he understands open source perfectly well and has no interest -- nor should he -- in obeying any ideology, yours for instance, as to how it's supposed to be handled, if it doesn't align with what he wants. He doesn't care whether he's doing open source "correctly."
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2. lifthrasiir ◴[19 Apr 25 09:00 UTC] No.43735160[source]▶
Yeah, he is free to do anything as he wants, but I'm also free to ignore his work due to his choice. And I don't think my decision is unique to me, hence the comment.