"Clojure in Unity 3D: Functional Video Game Development" by Ramsey Nasser and Tims Gardner
Strange Loop ConferenceCited 3× on HN, 2015–2015
talk · intermediate · 2015–2015 on HN
A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.
Cited as evidence that Clojure support in Unity exists, mostly in threads about game programming and Lisp scripting.
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3 comments from Hacker News
Strange Loop(2014) video:"Clojure in Unity 3D: Functional Video Game Development" by Ramsey Nasser and Tims Gardner" ▶ this video __ and __ link HN: link
Not really, for interactive UI development you need to model the UI as a pure function (no state in the view). So that limits you to React or React-like approaches, and game engines: ▶ this video For backed web development (in Clojure at least) there isn't really a lot of state in the first place - request comes in, request comes out, state is in the database not the application - so there are no framework constraints.
>Is having to learn a game engine going to be faster than starting from the ground up? Yes, pretty much by definition, since a game engine saves you the time of writing an engine. ;) Unity[0] and Game Maker[1] both come with tutorials which will show you how to build a basic game quickly. Game Maker uses its own properietary scripting language called GML, and Unity lets you do scripting in Javascript, C++, and Boo, which is basically Python. Also, attempts are being made to integrate Clojure support in Unity as well[2] On the other hand, if you like actually writing the code, there's a good chance there's a low-level framework (like SDL[3] for C++) which will let you code, but still take care of some of the hassle of cross-platform support and graphics. I've only played around* with SDL and C++ but there are quite a few tutorials for it. Also worth mentioning is Construct2[4], a game engine for html5/js. It is possible to do 3d rendering in javascript/html5[5], but as far as I know, only Chrome supports it well. Last I checked you have to change the config settings in firefox to allow opengl rendering to work and I just assume IE doesn't support it by default. If you want to work with 3D and want to get something done then Unity might be a good idea, although of course you're going to need good models, etc. Game Maker supports 3d but it's primarily for 2d. [0] link [1] link [2] ▶ this video [3] link [4] link [5] link *I've got some of the basics for Space Invaders done,