I was invited to demo Grain DDL at the Handmade Network Expo in Vancouver this year. What followed was 20 minutes sharing what Grain DDL is, and some pretty unique examples of how a code generator can be used. Come watch the talk on Youtube and check out the newly launched product page .
A designer who worked on a AAA open-world game once remarked that he spent weeks implementing a sweeping behaviour change across every traffic light in the world. A design change made it necessary to re-code every traffic intersection in the game to support right-on-red traffic. When he proposed that the next game be built with common traffic light logic that applied to all lights, the…
It is deceptively easy to make the mistake of attributing a language s popularity solely to the syntax and functional features of the language. In reviewing why languages became successful, there is often a retroactive feature-driven mythology wherein we over-attribute the success of a language to its unique syntax and functionality. Simultaneously, we under-attribute the environment the language…
Need In state logic or semantic markup with text strings, there are two options: in-band formatting, or out of band formatting. In-band formatting indicates changes in a string. For instance: Hello < span name = "first_name" > Fred </ span > Out-of-band markup involves describing a range of characters as having properties as part of a separate data structure. const char * text = "Hello Fred" ;…
Choosing what to work on is one of the most interesting parts of building software. As developers, we often see tooling with suboptimal efficiency and aspire to rewrite it. In many cases, the performance gains can be substantial but historically it has been user productivity gains that drive adoption in the large, not simply execution performance. When looking at the history of software adoption…