I’d like to present a new project, aimed at one of the areas where the Fennel ecosystem can be improved - project dependency management.
Other programming languages have tools to pull in, build, and load external dependencies. Java has Maven, Clojure has Leiningen and other projects like this, Python has Pip and Poetry, and Lua has Luarocks.
Tags / lua
Recently I was participating in a conversation about popular programming languages and I brought up Lua. I was met with a response like this:
Lua? Can you even do anything with this language?
The conversation then shifted towards discussing modern dynamic languages, mostly Python, and how it gives you everything Java does without being as complicated as Java.
I spent the previous ten days on vacation. Usually, I try to go off once or twice a year to somewhere where I can just passively relax - usually, it is some sea resort. This year I decided to go to the Republic of Türkiye and spend my time at the beach without any major attractions.
Early on in my career, when I saw a function that returns an anonymous function, I felt a weird mix of emotions. It was just a weird thing to do, especially when you’re coming from C, where there are no anonymous functions. Such concepts as lambdas in C++ were hard to grasp, and I’m thankful that instead of continuing to hit my head against the C++ wall I picked Scheme, and it helped me understand many core concepts, such as higher-order functions that we’ll be mainly talking about in this post.
Well, It’s unfortunate, but I couldn’t make the game in these 4 weeks. August is just too much of a pain in terms of the amount of different events - maybe even the busiest month in the whole year, for me personally. Judging by the commit history, I was able to work only for 11 days out of the 28 days given to me by the challenge - and I tried to do at least some work every day and commit everything I did.
Why is it the third week that I finally gain any interest in actually working on the game? Now, when I think of it, this may be the whole reason I couldn’t get into game dev during earlier attempts in the past years.
Didn’t have much progress on the Game2 this week. Mostly worked on some additional assets, and rendering the world into an isometric grid.
In the last post, I mentioned that it is very hard to come up with floor tiles that leave enough colors for things to be seen.
First week, second game!
This time I opted to go with plain Lua. Don’t get me wrong, I like Fennel, but I wanted to get a bit more authentic experience. Apart from having a nicer standard library, Fennel doesn’t add anything to the table in the case of the TIC-80 environment.
Lua is one of the most pleasant languages that I’ve used so far. Well, I’m not writing in Lua directly, instead, I use Fennel - a compiler for a Clojure/Lisp-like syntax to Lua. Because of that, I actually don’t really know Lua syntax that well, even though it’s really simple, it still has some quirks.
Lately, I’ve been into understanding asynchronous programming. Since my background is mostly bare metal C, which has no asynchronous programming whatsoever (apart from running on multiple chips, and communicating via shared memory), and I did only a little bit of C++ and Rust, it’s fair to say, that async is pretty new for me.