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.

It's not a "misconception". Open source implying open contributions is a very common stance, if not even the mainstream stance. Source availability is for better or for worse just one aspect of open source.

Open Source definition ( https://opensource.org/osd ) says nothing about community involvement or accepting contributions. It may be common, but it is not necessary, required or even hinted at in the license.

Open source is not a philosophy, it is a license.

For many it is very much a philosophy, a principle, and politics. The OSI is not the sole arbiter of what open source is, and while their definition is somewhat commonly referred to, it is not the be all end all.