Four Years of Jai (2024)

I have my doubts with Jai, the fact that Blow & co seems to have major misunderstandings with regards to RAII doesn't lend much confidence.

Also a 19,000 line C++ program(this is tiny) does not take 45 minutes unless something is seriously broken, it should be a few seconds at most for full rebuild even with a decent amount of template usage. This makes me suspect this author doesn't have much C++ experience, as this should have been obvious to them.

I do like the build script being in the same language, CMake can just die.

The metaprogramming looks more confusing than C++, why is "sin"/"cos" a string?

Based on this article I'm not sure what Jai's strength is, I would have assumed metaprogramming and SIMD prior, but these are hardly discussed, and the bit on metaprogramming didn't make much sense to me.

Honestly I concur. Out of interest in what sort of methods they came up with to manage memory, I checked out the language's wiki, and not sure if going back to 1970s C (with the defer statement on top) is an improvement. You have to write defer everywhere, and if your object outlives the scope of the function, even that is useless.

I'm sure having to remember to free resources manually has caused so much grief, that they decided to come up with RAII, so an object going out of scope (either on the stack, or its owning object getting destroyed) would clean up its resources.

Compared to a lot of low-level people, I don't hate garbage collection either, with a lot of implementations reducing to pointer bumping for allocation, which is an equivalent behavior to these super-fast temporary arenas, with the caveat that once you run out of memory, the GC cleans up and defragments your heap.

If for some reason, you manage to throw away the memory you allocated before the GC comes along, all that memory becomes junk at zero cost, with the mark-and-sweep algorithm not even having to look at it.

I'm not claiming either GC or RAII are faultless, but throwing up your hands in the air and going back to 1970s methods is not a good solution imo.

That being said, I happen to find a lot that's good about Jai as well, which I'm not going to go into detail about.