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by agentultra
3408 days ago
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> However I feel like FP isn't effective for gamedev. Oddly, in my limited experience, it is very effective. I can't say it's the right pattern for every game but for the current roguelike I've been working on in my spare time it's been the best thing since sliced bread. I use the Reader and State Transformer monads in a pattern similar to the Elm Architecture that results in my engine being completely deterministic. This allows me to dump all of the initial state of the game and all of the serialized inputs to it. I can then take that dump and step through that entire game session. This is great for debugging with friends and stuff: when they encounter an error or something they don't like they can just send me the dump file and I can replay their entire session. It's been pretty cool being able to do that. Another thing I didn't understand at first was that immutability seemed like an egregious waste of resources. It might still be for some applications but it has much better performance characteristics than my intuition had led me to believe... because structural sharing. You can have this big blob of state that looks like it's being copied every where but it's not -- under the hood you're actually sharing 99% of the previous state and not copying anything. It's not likely you're going to be writing a bleeding-edge rendering engine in a pure FP language on any current generation hardware platforms but you can get quite far with it. |
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"A Worst Case for Functional Programming?"
http://prog21.dadgum.com/189.html
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7043644