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Comment by brabel

9 months ago

Maybe people will make fun of me, but I've been very happy with Kotlin and Dart. Null-safe, good ergonomics, very fast.

I've tried Rust, sometimes play with C, D, Deno/TS, Nim, Java (actually I still write lots of it) and even some more cutting-edge stuff, like Unison. While they're cool, what I want is a language with really good tooling that gets out of my way without letting me write patently dumb code (like Java lets me use any object without checking for null, when it can be null but the language just doesn't give a shit to help me).

I use Dart when I want to compile to binary executable or use Flutter, and Kotlin for stuff I think the JVM has more to offer, like a server. The two languages are just a pleasure to use, pretty similar but having completely different ecosystems (which is great, you can use the best one for the job!).

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brabel

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nu11ptr  9 months ago

I'm glad you found tools/languages that work for you. Kotlin felt a little too much like Java to me. If I stuck with a JVM lang. I'd probably go back to Scala 3, but I just don't like the JVM as a user (just sucks too many resources).

nmfisher  9 months ago

I wrote a Flutter package[0] that wraps the Filament 3D renderer, which I used to make a mini game for a Flutter game competition:

https://devpost.com/software/escape-from-heat-island

(Judging is still ongoing and votes would really be appreciated! It would help me to get more resources to work on the underlying package).

This was my first ever “game” (tech demo, really), and I’m not a game dev, so take this with a grain of salt - but I do think there’s a lot of potential for Flutter/Dart as a game framework. Hot reload makes iterating on game logic very fast, you obviously get the UI toolkit and cross-platform support straight out of the box, and the language itself is (relatively) concise, so it lends itself well to gameplay programming. When you need to get your hands dirty at a lower level, you just drop down to C++ (or whatever engine you can expose via FFI).

I think Google believe that Flutter can nab market share from Unity in casual 2D games (hence their official sponsored competition), but I think it has even more potential than that. In fact, I’ve seen at least two game companies (Supercell and another whose name I’ve forgotten) hiring for people to work on embedding the Flutter engine in various platform games.

[0] https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_filament.git

YawningAngel  9 months ago

I like Kotlin but I find the fact that it lacks a good way to detect and handle possible errors very frustrating. If some function can fail on sane-looking input I'd like to know about it