Scripting languages offer the comfort of automatic type inference. The way we approached this in our own scripting language
was by having meta-data alongside memory containing the data.

*A few commenters recommended unions. Although interesting, we prefered to extend the enum variables and keep the pointer variable flexible, instead of extending the struct with new types.

Languages that auto-magically infer the type from what you populate
the object with like Javascript, Python and Lua, store meta-data about
your data. This meta-data is used to allow the correct operations to happen
on said objects.

Continue Reading "Auto Typing in C(++)"

How I stumbled upon Blitz3D

Growing up, one of my favorite coding languages and platforms was Blitz3D.

Blitz3D is part of the Blitz language family which was used in the Amiga platform. Open-sourcing of the latter, enabled grassroots efforts to emerge, and from this wave, a New Zealand company called Blitz Research Ltd,  launched Blitz3D.

During that time I was exhausting VisualBasic and getting bored of reverse engineering videos games on the Dreamcast/Playstation/PSP.

When I started getting into game development, Blitz3D presented a platform and a rich bustling community that allowed me to learn quickly while exchanging expertise and ideas.

I met many mentors and friends that I still keep in touch with today!

So I was plenty surprised when Blitz3D went open source a few months back!

Continue Reading "Pre-Code Review Excavation of Blitz3D"