Tag: lisp

When I first learned about Chibi, an embeddable scheme that allows scripting on C programs, I immediately tried it out on my game engine. I was able to make it work with my existing APIs but I kept on running against segfaults and memory issues. The community was helpful in answering my questions as I tried to track down the cause of the bug, but I eventually gave up out of frustration.

I then learned about Chicken Scheme, a somewhat competitor to Chibi that does the same thing but with a larger community and more documentation. I checked it out and liked it so I went ahead and implemented it.

Thankfully I have not experienced any segfaults anymore. It's not because Chicken is better (I don't know well enough of the two to make a good comparison) but because I've come to better understand how to properly structure my code …

I've long wondered if I should add a scripting language to my game engine. I know that most game engines could do without such a feature but I just recently came across Chibi-Scheme, a library that allows the use of Scheme lisp scripting for C programs.

I like Lisp. I use it a lot when customizing my Emacs environment (using ELisp). There's something about it's syntax and different way to structure programs that appeals to my programmer brain. I've toyed with other Lisp flavors but never had a strong enough reason to continue using them. With Chibi-scheme I may have found that reason.

I am aware that Lisp is not as widespread as Lua or Javascript. And that choosing it might limit the number of potential people to try out my game engine. But as I've been telling myself over and over, this is a self-learning project. So it's okay …