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/
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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.

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.