Developing a Space Flight Simulator: From C to GNU Guile to Clojure
By
todsacerdoti
Hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, baked to perfection. Worth every minute at the bakery.
Summary
A developer shares their journey of creating a space flight simulator, starting from inspiration by Orbiter 2016 simulator. They detail their technical progression from prototyping rigid body physics in C to using GNU Guile (Scheme) for its native interface and hygienic macros, and finally settling on Clojure for its multi-methods and fast data structures. The article focuses on programming language choices and technical implementation details for game development.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledIn 2017 I discovered the free of charge Orbiter 2016 space flight simulator which was proprietary at the time and it inspired me to develop a space flight simulator myself.
I used GNU Guile (a Scheme implementation) because it has a good native interface and of course it has hygienic macros.
Eventually I got interested in Clojure because unlike GNU Guile it has multi-methods as well as fast hash maps and vectors.
I prototyped some rigid body physics in C and later in GNU Guile and also prototyped loading and rendering of Wavefront OBJ files.
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