Hot code swapping will be huge for gamedev. The idea that Zig will basically support it by default with a compiler flag is wild. Try doing that, clang.
Totally agree with that - although even right now zig is excellent for gamedev, considering it's performant, uses LLVM (in release modes), can compile REALLY FAST (in debug mode), it has near-seamless C integration, and the language itself is really pleasant to use (my opinion).
Yes, at a huge cost. That only works on Microsoft platforms.
MSVC++ is a nice compiler, sure, but it's not GCC or Clang. It's very easy to have a great feature set when you purposefully cut down your features to the bare minimum. It's like a high-end restaurant. The menu is concise and small and high quality, but what if I'm allergic to shellfish?
GCC and Clang have completely different goals, and they're much more ambitious. The upside of that is that they work on a lot of different platforms. The downside is that the quality of features may be lower, or some features may be missing.
I ended up switching from Zig to C# for a tiny game project because C# already supports cross-platform hot reload by default. (It’s just `dotnet watch`.) Coupled with cross-compilation, AOT compilation and pretty good C interop, C# has been great so far.
That is basically what they do when using Lua, Python, C#, Java, but with less parenthesis, which apparently are too scary for some folks, moving from print(x) to (print x).
There was a famous game with Lisp scripting, Abuse, and Naughty Dog used to have Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
I had exactly the same title in mind, remember my very young self being in shock when I learned that it was lisp. If you didn't look under the hood you'd never be able to tell, it just worked.