A while ago I’ve watched this amazing talk: Condition Systems in an Exceptional Language by Chris Houser. And more recently I’ve found one interesting library called farolero, which provides a set of functions and macros that mimic Common Lisp’s condition system. So I was generally interested in the topic and decided to give it a shot and try both approaches.
Categories / programming
Today we’ll take a look at an interesting Java library, called PF4J, which describes itself as a Plugin Framework for Java. The main purpose of this library is to provide a way of detecting, initializing, and using plugins to extend your Java application with new features without the need to modify the code.
Update:
All the patches1, 2 has been merged into the main branch of Fennel language, so expect to see improved fennelview in next stable release! Some semantics have been altered, so I’ve updated the post a bit to reflect the changes.
Previously I decided to implement a rather basic raycasting engine in ClojureScript. It was a lot of fun, an interesting experience, and ClojureScript was awesome. I’ve implemented a small labyrinth game and thought about adding more features to the engine, such as camera shake, and wall height change.
Ray casting is quite an old technique, that was heavily used in the early days of game development in a lot of games to create an illusion of 3D space. The most known example, and perhaps the first widely successful game that used this technique, was Wolfenstein 3D, made by ID Software in 1992.
At the end of the Part 2 I mentioned that quasiquoting was problematic in GRScheme, due to some of the internal representations and algorithms, but now it is not an issue (I hope).
I’ve figured out the correct way to maintain a list invariant, splice one tree into another tree, and so on.
Good things happened since my previous post! I’ve finished rewriting the interpreter from recursive to iterative, which means that there will be no stack overflows when traversing deep trees. I’ve also simplified name binding and lookup systems added support for arbitrary-sized integers, fractions, and 64-bit floating point numbers, but most importantly figured out tail call elimination and closures.
At the end of my previous post, I mentioned that I will write more about GRScheme - the language that I’m working on. As of this moment, I’m rewriting it to be more robust and to fix some design flaws that make it impossible to do such things as tail call elimination.
This is the first public post that I wrote because I’ve finally thought that I’m clever enough to do so. Yet I must mention that I have never actually studied Programming Language Theory (PLT), so I’m not a specialist on the topic I gonna talk about here.