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Nujel

A Lisp inspired language for games and other latency sensitive applications. Development started in order to give WolkenWelten a scripting runtime. While Nujel is still very early in development, and for the most part just a terrible Scheme, it is stabilizing rapidly. Even though the language is still very much in flux, the following points might give you an idea as to which direction Nujel is going in and which tradeoffs have been made.

Why Nujel?

Mostly because I need a language/runtime with the following properties for WolkenWelten:

Should allow for fast code

In general the performance of the scripting layer is not that important, except for the parts where it is, like worldgen. It does not have to be pretty or easy to write but is essential to allow for certain parts to be optimized extremely.

Static typing

While dynamic typing can be fast, it is much harder to pull off, the much simpler solution is to put that burden on the programmer. Although Nujel might default to an any/boxed type, which should feel similar to dynamic typing.

Focus on Imperative looping constructs

As with dynamic typing, it is just much easier to support fast for-loops than it is to make map/reduce fast.

Portable

Windows/ARM/WASM need to be supported perfectly, requiring x86/Linux would exclude too many users.

Build environment

Nujel should only require Make and a somewhat modern C compiler as a build environement, this makes it much easier to port to various platforms, since they probably already have a great C compiler.

Powerful metaprogramming

This mostly means macros/runtime code generation, enabling DSLs which I would love to use in all kinds of areas of WolkeWelten (Animal Behaviour/WorldGen/UI)

Easy for beginners

Modding for WolkenWelten should be as open and inclusive as possible, this means spending a lot of time and effort on polishing documentation, writing tutorials, improving error handling/messages and building a welcoming and supportive community.

Highly concurrent

In order to make scripting easier each entity in WolkenWelten should have a fiber associated to it, which can block or be preempted without interfering with other fibers. This should make scripting a lot easier since modders can just write, simple, synchronous code.

No huge GC pauses

While a GC is probably necessary to ensure memory safety and also be easy and convenient for beginners, huge stop the world GC pauses are just unacceptable for a videogame. To enable this while also allowing for thousands of concurrent fibers.