HeadlinesBriefing favicon HeadlinesBriefing.com

Experimental Voxel Game Built with Dyalog APL and SDL3 Challenges Conventional Wisdom

Hacker News •
×

A developer has created a voxel game using Dyalog APL and SDL3, challenging conventional assumptions about game development languages. The project began as a personal bet that APL's notation would simplify voxel game creation, though the result remains highly experimental and buggy. Players can navigate with standard WASD controls, place blocks, and toggle various rendering modes.

The game requires Dyalog APL 20.0A, a C compiler, CMake, and modern graphics APIs including Vulkan, DirectX12, or Metal. Installation involves building and installing LSE libraries on macOS/Linux systems, with Windows requiring SDL3 development libraries and manual DLL placement. Shader compilation demands multiple tools: the DirectX Shader Compiler, glslc, and spirv-cross.

Several technical limitations plague the current build. Significant performance regressions affect Windows users, while DirectX12 backend support remains broken on that platform. Players cannot restart sessions without reloading, and memory leaks likely exist within the codebase. The project earns credit for experimentation despite these hurdles.

This represents an unusual intersection of array programming and real-time graphics, pushing boundaries in both domains. While impractical for production use, it demonstrates APL's potential for computational geometry tasks.