Elixir for game development

In theory, you can use erlangs :wx module to have GUI, you can even do OpenGL, but to be honest… Don’t!

The interface to :wx and OpenGL through erlang is very clumsy, because a multi-layered inheritance graph has been hammered down into a single behaviour. Mixed with a kind of mutable state that feels foreign in erlang/elixir, its no fun at all.

Also OpenGL is plain OpenGL, not the cool helpers which make OGL “accessible”… Many of the very useful helpers are missing and you need to rebuild them yourself.

Also there have been versions of SDL for the BEAM, but AFAIK they are all abondoned.

So I wouldn’t suggest to build the client with “pure” BEAM technology.

What could work though, is to build logic in the BEAM and also have a “Port” which communicates to another prgram which deals with user interaction/communication.

You can use any language you like for that interaction-Port.

You might probably require two different run-time systems on the clients computer. The BEAM and maybe the one for the Port…

And at the end of the post, I do remember, that @Qqwy or @OvermindDL1 planned to make a GUI package on top of a FRP-framework he build himself, but I’m not sure who of those two…

Perhaps you can build on top of that if it is already ready to use…

Yes, I was busy building a Functional Reactive Programming wrapper on top of :wx, but it is quite the ambitious project, and I have not been able to devote a lot of time to it lately.

There is also a QtQuick bridge that would be pure awesome if it works well. I haven’t had time / motivation to try it out yet, but QtQuick is a declarative UI system that is absolutely fantastic (ok, I am biased: I worked at the company that made it, and was involved with its evolution in the first several years) .. it’s like what HTML5 should have been

Thank you for the answers. It helps being able to have a view of what you can and can not do with a thing you plan to learn. So far, I love Elixir, and plan to learn as much and as fast as I can. I will focus on web development, as I already do at this point in PHP and JS. The reason I asked is because I hope one day I will be able to build apps that do not need a browser to run. But is clear that I have a lot to learn until then. Maybe by then, the ecosystem will have more tools. At this point I don’t feel that confident to be the one to make any of them.

If You know JS already You can try Electron to build application with it.

The BEAM rules on servers, not clients, I would not recommend building a visual client on the BEAM.

You ‘can’, but I’d not recommend it.

@Qqwy was building an FRP in Elixir, I already built one in OCaml->Javascript. ^.^

Ooo, QtQuick is a good idea, I’ve use QML and it is indeed awesome.

If you want a web client, well Elixir makes a dang fine server for that. ^.^

Guh, I hate Electron, nothing eats more resources on my system then loading any Electron app… >.>

Which IMHO is very, very unfortunate. BEAM languages, especially Elixir, would be amazing to write client applications in if there was a good rich GUI facility. wxWidgets is not that (just look at the fun the last weeks on the erlang list about this!), but one can imagine such a thing existing. The lack of a good modern toolkit is one of the last things that holds the BEAM forever on headless services.

Concurrency is absolutely huge for modern GUI applications, something we’ve been working around for the last couple decades with one hack or another. Threading is a nightmare, so it is often faked with event loops and async I/O to varying degrees of success.

Good, modern UI toolkits put as much of the UI as possible in threads (QtQuick does this in several ways, as well as putting as much on the GPU as possible) leaving the application code to languish in yesterday’s development paradigms. It would be absolutely wonderful to be able to develop rich client applications with a language that gave you good concurrency out of the box. The other benefits like FP rather than OOP and all the other bits and pieces would be the icing on the cake.

If you like to do some functional web client I think Elm might be a nice option.

If you would like to create an installed client you could take a look at Arcadia. It is built on top of unity so for more serious projects it is nice to be able to leverage all the features off a fully fledged game engine.

Both of which could be combined with an elixir backend ofc

@NobbZ: that’s really interesting!

I’m not planning writing game yet, but I heard about some topics related to it. Probably the most interesting was Vulcan API. Do you know if there is any possibility to “connect” features from Elixir world and Vulcan API?

Today’s CPUs (also in mobile devices) have lots of cores, for example 8 cores is not something new. I think that it could be awesome to have game data processing and process managing in Elixir and combine it with Vulcan API. Last time I saw a card game in beta version that does not loaded images for all cards and really fast I got idea like: Here Supervisor would be just perfect!.

And think about that ad: First game that could use full power of your CPU! It's written using Elixir and ...

Vulkan (not Vulcan) is significantly lower level, manage your own memory and all, and very unforgiving for errors. Overall you will not get much of a speed difference if any between well written OpenGL and well written Vulkan except in a few very specific cases. Mostly Vulkan is just OpenGL cleaned up of it’s ancient cruft.

Eh I’ve already been doing so in C++ (custom engine) and Rust (amethyst, new engine). ^.^

Elixir/BEAM would not be performant for a client, at all. Maybe as a scripting layer, but not much beyond that at all…