PongChamp

Welcome to our PongChamp language! This was a project that was started as a weekend thing and we plan to keep expanding on it to integrate a simple but feature-full game engine. The goal of the language is to be coupled tightly to the engine so that it can make it as easy as possible to script with it.

Building

• refer to the contributing docs for specific details
• stack build is necessary for now to build your own executable for your target architecture

Build Nuances

• unfortunately currently it is required to have the sdl lib installed to your system (sdl2)
• The engine will eventually move into an open-gl based engine, while the base design of the engine is decided on a temporary engine is in place to demo functionality of the language.
• Windows builds will require more effort to ensure proper c libs are installed
• In order to build the windows target mingw-w64 is needed

Running

The simplest way to do this is to run ./bin/PongChamp [file], or if you are on Windows python3 .\bin\PongChamp [file]. This ensures your library path is appropriately set. Since the engine-lib is not installed to your machines known library path, LD_LIBRARY_PATH needs to be set for stack to function correctly. If you want to run with stack, this may serve your purposes: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/engine-lib/ stack run -- [file]. Note that for a Windows build to function properly the PATH variable needs to be set, rather than LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The python script also does this currently.

Current features

• Exceptions and exception handling
• Loops
• Datatypes: Number, String, Boolean, Objects
• Object Literals
• Higher order functions
• Branching
• A set of unary and binary operators
• Variable assignment
• No module system

Integration with C++ engine

Haskell provides a FFI interface to interface with other languages. However, in order to interface with a C++ library, it is necessary to write a c wrapper around the engine and then interface with C. Currently, we have a thin demo engine which serves as an example of this. In the examples directory are multiple scripts testing (or demonstrating errors) the language, to view an example "game" run full-engine.js. This follows the general desired format of the future language features, however some of the minor details which actually make the game, like passing around the engine pointer, or the main game loop, will be abstracted in a style similar to P5.js. As an example of a more detailed engine that will eventually be integrated, refer to this example.

Known Issues

• The biggest issue is haskell errors are being swallowed
• No garbage collection

Other Notes

• Many developer notes are contained in this directory.
• The first major version of PongChamp will be after sufficient language features are implemented.