Programming language with native code support, No framework (I write the framework)

Question

Hi.

I'm looking for a programming language. It should be an easy language to learn, and should have a Garbage Collector. It should be a basic language with features like basic types (integer, boolean), arrays and etc, and I should write the framework.

It is for a game editor I want to write. The editor's designer will write the code of the UI in this programming language. The framework will be a 2D graphics and audio framework, and in the future it'll be 3D too.

I thought about the new Go language, but it doesn't have much support and theres no binding to OpenGL and etc.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, that's a fairly broad question and without more specific requirements it is difficult to give a focused answer, but it sounds like C (or C++) would fit the bill for you. The languages you described all owe their syntax to C. C will compile to native code. C is basic language in that there is not much to learn beyond the basic syntax and it has all the basic primitives that you require.

Now that you've added the requirement of a garbage collected language, I suppose that you could try Go, but that language is not mature and there's always a risk there.

Answer 2

C++ is Great, it's not scripting lang, so you don't even need a scripting host.

Answer 3

The obvious two are C or C++. However, D is closer to Java and C# given that it has a garbage collector in the standard, as well as an alternative standard library that is fairly closer to Java than the C++ standard library. The downside with D is that they tools are not as mature as C++ or C and the community isn't as large.

The obvious solution though it to look down the list of compiled languages on wikipedia and see which you like the look of.

Answer 4

If you don't want to manage memory all by yourself like C or C++, you can try the new Go language. It compiles to native code (albeit for Linux and MacOSX only for now) and comes with a basic framework that can be easily replaced with your own framework.

It has a very active user base, so IMO it is possible to mature quickly.

Answer 5

Enjoy a challenge?

Try go.

Here's a tech talk by rob pike, and here is a discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/topics .

Answer 6

You may want to look at Lua.

Lua is a relatively tiny language which manages to be capable and universal with just a few concepts. The BNF specification for the whole language fits easily on one page. It has numbers, booleans, tables and functions, and surprisingly that's all the datatypes it needs. It can even work in an object-oriented fashion.

There's a compiler, Luac, that compiles Lua to bytecode.

Lua is already being used as a UI programming language for games. Addons for World of Warcraft and a few other games are programmed in Lua. I believe Lua is a very good fit for this kind of task.

You want OpenGL? OK... http://luagl.wikidot.com/ is an OpenGL library for Lua.

Answer 7

Since we don't know what you want to do, I don't know what are the chances we success. Therefor, what about a language where you have to set the probability of your statement to fail :

Meet GOTO++.

Don't say "thanks you", it's on me.