Developer Voices

Pony is a language born out of what should be a simple need - actor-style programming with C performance. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be too hard to do. Writing an actor framework isn’t trivial, but it’s well-trodden ground. The hard part is balancing performance and memory management. When your actors start passing hundreds of thousands of complex messages around, either you need some complex rules about who owns and frees which piece of memory, or you just copy every piece of data and kill your performance. Pony’s solution is a third way - a novel approach to memory management called reference capabilities.In this week’s Developer Voices, Sean Allen joins us from the Pony team to explain what reference capabilities are, how Pony uses them in its high-performance actor framework, and how they implement a garbage collector without stop-the-world pauses. The result is a language for performant actors, and a set of ideas bigger than the language itself…–Pony: https://www.ponylang.io/The Pony Tutorial: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/The Pony Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/Azul Garbage Collector: https://www.azul.com/products/components/pgc/Shenandoah Garbage Collector: https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/shenandoah/MainA String of Ponies (Distributed Actors Paper): https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~scb12/publications/s.blessing.pdfGarbage Collection with Pony-ORCA: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/appendices/garbage-collection.html–Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/joinKris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

This week we take a look at Bevy, a new game engine written in Rust. And in particular, we look at a core component of Bevy that has something to teach you even if you never write a game: its Entity Component System, or ECS. An ECS is an approach to managing complex systems with large numbers of moving parts, that takes some inspiration from the Relational Database world, and a little from Functional Programming to build something entirely unique and surprisingly high-performance.Joining us to explain all is Alice Cecile. She’s part of the Bevy foundation, which is charting a course from data-management and rendering tool to fully-featured game development environment. A journey they’ve made huge progress on, but still expect to take another decade to come to full fruition. We look at the core ECS, and the wider project-management approaches they need to make the journey.–Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/joinBevy: https://bevyengine.org/Bevy Examples: https://bevyengine.org/examples/Flecs (C++): https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecsTiny Glade (game): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/Alice on Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@alice_i_cecileKris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

Given how many languages have been written in C over the years, it’s not surprising to see new languages being written in Rust. What is surprising about this week’s guest is the domain he’s writing for: Computer Aided Design (CAD). Could Rust be sneaking its way into the CAD world too?Joining me to discuss the design and implementation of a CAD programming language is Adam Chalmers. He works at Zoo, developing KCL - a language that looks like JavaScript, runs on Rust, and offers users a seamless hybrid experience of both coding and point-and-click modelling. So, how does that all fit together?In this episode we look at the design and implementation of a programming language in Rust; how KittyCAD creates that hybrid environment for text-based programming and point-and-click modelling; and how we can learn to write our own Rust-interpreted languages.–Adam’s Blog: https://adamchalmers.com/Adam’s Guide To Writing Parsers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF3kMyzMC40Zoo’s Modelling App: https://zoo.dev/modeling-appMechanical CAD: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomorrowA Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/legoWinnow: https://docs.rs/winnow/latest/winnow/Nom: https://docs.rs/nom/latest/nom/Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/Satisfactory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/Crafting Interpreters: https://craftinginterpreters.com/Coding in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/joinAdam on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

For some kinds of application, there is no faster or cheaper way to build a user interface than in the terminal. Sure, it’s not going to suit every kind of user out there, but for those of us that are happy on the command line, rich Text User Interfaces (or TUIs) open all the exploration and discoverability benefits of a GUI are a fraction of the development time.This week we’re looking at a Rust TUI library with the excellent name ‘ratatui’. We’re joined by Orhun Parmaksız, one of the lead developers and a huge TUI enthusiast on a quest to see how far Text UIs can be pushed.–Ratatui: https://ratatui.rs/Ratatouille Tutorials: https://ratatui.rs/tutorials/Tui Realm: https://github.com/veeso/tui-realmAwesome Ratatui: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatuiRTL SDR: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/Rust Snake AI: https://github.com/bones-ai/rust-snake-ai-ratatuiSystemCtl-Tui: https://github.com/rgwood/systemctl-tuiGitU: https://github.com/altsem/gitu…and GitUi: https://github.com/extrawurst/gituiGitCliff Changelog Tool: https://git-cliff.org/ATAC (Postman in the Terminal): https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/ATACBubbleTea (TUIs in Golang): https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbleteaImgcat (images in the terminal): https://github.com/danielgatis/imgcatTachyonFX: https://github.com/junkdog/tachyonfxASCIITheatre: https://ascii.theater/Rio Terminal: https://raphamorim.io/rio/–Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/joinKris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins