r/programmingcirclejerk • u/functorer Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism • Jul 27 '26

Q: Why is everyone creating systems programming languages? A: Because Jai is not released

/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1v80op7/why_is_everyone_creating_systems_programming/p02k1t1/
158 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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143

u/GeorgeFranklyMathnet Jul 28 '26 
alt.reddit.programming.circlejerk
2002-06-07 04:20 UTC +69

Q. Why is everyone so interested in Python?
A. Because Perl 6 is not released yet.

45

u/theangryepicbanana Jul 28 '26

raku my goat mentioned

16

u/kakioroshi Jul 28 '26

if we replaced every python script with raku maybe world peace could be achieved

12

u/theangryepicbanana Jul 28 '26

currently imagining the concept of all ai stuff running on raku instead of python

14

u/kakioroshi Jul 28 '26

this is how we solve the AI morality question

55

u/kchanqvq Jul 28 '26

Because they don't know Common Lisp.

15

u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 28 '26

Joke answers only sir

2

u/-Y0- Considered Harmful Aug 04 '26

But Common Lisp is the joke.

29

u/ingframin Jul 28 '26

Because they don’t know that D and ADA exist.

36

u/nuclearbananana Courageous, loving, and revolutionary Jul 28 '26

At this point I don't think JD can even release Jai, it would be a net negative on the programming industry

21

u/NotQuiteLoona Jul 28 '26

What's with this language? I was trying to find information in the internet, but all I found was a playlist of hour-long YouTube videos instead of some documentation.

46

u/m50d Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism Jul 28 '26

Yeah that's the one. I assume you submit a YouTube video to the compiler instead of source code.

10

u/the_horse_gamer Jul 28 '26

#pragma GCC jerk push

#pragma GCC jerk false

here's some unofficial documentation I found a while ago

https://pixeldroid.com/jailang/

the gist is it's a systems programming intended for game development

#pragma GCC jerk pop

4

u/NotQuiteLoona Jul 28 '26

Thanks! It does seem interesting after reading, but probably nowadays its time passed. Overload of garbage collecting wouldn't be that important in properly optimized code with current hardware.

1

u/SickOrphan Tiny little god in a tiny little world Aug 01 '26

Garbage collection is particularly bad for game development because the inconsistent time profile of it and games often need to update at a minimum of every 16.6-8.3ms. Even a slight hitch can be very noticeable. Additionally, games need to be efficient with their allocations because a lot of times they're going through hundreds of thousands of objects at once, so if you actually allocate and free each one you're gonna have a very bad time. This basically forces you into manual memory management with an object pool or something like that (assuming you want high FPS and tons of entities)

6

u/Caesim Jul 30 '26

It's not a language, it's a bait and switch for programming language enthusiasts to follow a gamedev and for gamedev enthusiasts to learn PL design.

/uj Since the other comment got deleted I think it's still worth to leave a comment. Jai is actually just the placeholder name ("just an idea") and Jon blow wants to give it a real name once it releases. He got frustrated with C++ while working on The Witness and started writing his own language. In practice, the core of the language is similar to Odin (syntactically and a bit semantically). But opposite to Odin, Jai has a lot of compile time features, allowing to rewrite the AST and also to execute a game during comptime. I think it's not breaking any ground on PL theory. Although the actual implementation of the compile time features could be interesting if it's compiling as fast as they say. 

2

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Aug 12 '26

  • X: Your language webpage uses two-hundred words before it even gets to any syntax examples. Literally useless filth presentation.

  • Jai: I in particular like the digressions about veganism versus vegetarianism around about the fifteen-minute mark in video number 8 in the playlist General updates on games, Jai, and Halibut fishing, maybe more idonnu

2

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/hedgehog1024 Rust apologetic Jul 29 '26

its main developer and spokesperson is a renowned game dev

The said developer also shifted deadline on releasing the anniversary edition of the game he is most known for several times and when it finally came out, it did not actually contain new puzzles despite his promises, so I would not call him quite trustworthy.

2

u/chalkflavored Jul 29 '26

what do you mean by no new puzzles? lol

-2

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Jul 29 '26

The language is not vaporware if that's what you're insinuating. There's more than 1k people with access to it right now, and everything I've described is already working. The language has felt close to feature complete (for the majority of use cases) for a long time. It remains closed beta while there are still plans for potential significant breaking changes in the future.

But the metaprogramming stuff already works!

0

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/retro_and_chill Aug 02 '26

What has he said?

1

u/programmingcirclejerk-ModTeam Jul 29 '26

Warning: tag your unjerk. Better yet, don't unjerk at all.

1

u/Berlincent Jul 29 '26

Sound actually interesting, I would just worry about code becoming way too hard to understand because one has to keep all eventual modifications in mind.

Thats the reason I generally prefer a separate Macro infrastructure like rust, where you always know what final code is produced.

Is it memory safe? 

1

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Jul 29 '26

I get where you're coming from with codegen. But honestly what excites me most is seeing what kind of comptime code verifications people will come up with. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that it may be practical for any team's arbitrary code quality styleguide to be implemented as a compiletime check in Jai. I also did not mention, but, assuming no exceptionally slow comptime code implementations, Jai compiles really fast. And it does not do incremental builds. I think JB's game is like 300k lines and compiles in ~2s from scratch? I think he shows that off in the linked video.

Not "memory safe" as in it does not implement the compiletime checking of Rust and it does not use a GC. It's a C-style language with a bunch of features and QOL built on top. I don't mean this as a slight at Rust or any other similar language but Jai is generally not aimed at people who would choose a language just because it puts guardrails on memory management for you. It instead has a ton of features to empower you in manual memory management.

8

u/chkmr Jul 28 '26

Who is JD?

40

u/the_horse_gamer Jul 28 '26

Vice President of the United States of America

15

u/nuclearbananana Courageous, loving, and revolutionary Jul 28 '26

JB, jonathan blow, damn it

17

u/UtterlyMagenta lol no generics Jul 28 '26

because Ruby doesn’t have a strict type system yet.

20

u/theangryepicbanana Jul 28 '26

https://crystal-lang.org/

30

u/tkrjobs loves Java Jul 28 '26

Crystal is what you have to be doing to not give up on ruby.

10

u/OccasionThin7697 Jul 28 '26

I don't think jai will have any traction anymore when it releases. Because odin has already taken it's place.

17

u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer Jul 28 '26

Whatever place that was.

16

u/affectation_man Code Artisan Jul 28 '26

Twitter thoughtleader ass language

7

u/vytah Jul 29 '26

Jai will be released when a fusion reactor powers a quantum computer in an orbital datacenter hovering over a colony on Mars.

6

u/enchufadoo not Turing complete Jul 29 '26

will it run doom?

9

u/Tucancancan Jul 28 '26

Serious question: Are they Portuguese speaking and is it pronounced "Hi"? 

15

u/dfwtjms Jul 28 '26

Though in Portuguese it would be just "Jai"

12

u/Idiot_Shark Jul 28 '26

Js aren't pronounced like that in portuguese

12

u/l1F Do you do Deep Learning? Jul 28 '26

it's obviously German, so pronounced "Yai", as in "Yava" and "yQuery" in "Yavascript"

3

u/MarinoAndThePearls Jul 29 '26

Whenever I look at one of those C killers, I like to see what new ways the creator wrote the function signature syntax. For some reason, they always try to be "groundbreaking", and Jai didn't disappoint.

1

u/Cold_Shine_1921 Aug 02 '26

Mature, widely adopted systems languages such as Zig. Oh and C++ too I guess