WIP game in ClojureScript using BabylonJS
Clojure is designed to be a "hosted" language. From the official website:
Clojure is designed to be a hosted language, sharing the JVM type system, GC, threads etc.
ClojureScript is Clojure hosted on JS VMs.
I personally prefer ClojureScript over JS - it is a pleasure to use, and comes with great tooling and libraries. When I want to do something - such as write a SPA, or draw charts, or communicate over websockets, or write state-machines, or even 2D games, there is generally a high-level idiomatic ClojureScript library available for me to use.
Game Engines are some of the most mutation-heavy systems around, and writing games - especially 3D ones - in functional languages is still a very arcane topic. Sadly, there also appears to be no stable, high-level, well-maintained Clojure/Script library for this purpose.
I will talk about my journey of writing a 3D game in Clojure:
- what choices I made
- what problems I faced
- how I solved / worked around them
- what the game is like right now
- where I am going with it
I will also demo the game and talk about my experiences, likes/dislikes, and the overall suitability of Clojure for a project like this, and how it performed under the stress of working with an inherently alien, mutable world.
Mostly, I want to find out whether writing "serious" 3D games in Clojure is possible and practical, and what are the tradeoffs it entails.
To get an interactive development environment run:
lein figwheel
and open your browser at localhost:3449. This will auto compile and send all changes to the browser without the need to reload.
To clean all compiled files:
lein clean
To create a production build run:
lein do clean, cljsbuild once min
And open your browser in resources/public/index.html. You will not
get live reloading, nor a REPL.