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Re:Racket: The Lisp for the Modern Day by jacknews on Friday June 30, 2023 @11:11AM (#36536313)
Is it any good for actual games though?

I have one kid using scratch now, and one older graduated to godot, roblox/lua, some javascript/web.

I would love to get them into lisp (already done a bit of Janet along with me), but it really needs to be something they can write their game ideas in, and share/show-off to friends.

Re:Racket: The Lisp for the Modern Day by soegaard on Friday June 30, 2023 @11:45AM (#36537052)
Here is one using Raylib: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WkSSbbO8tk

Here is a library for making retro games: https://r-cade.io/

Ask on Discourse or Discord, for more game options.

Re:Racket: The Lisp for the Modern Day by tgbugs on Friday June 30, 2023 @02:03PM (#36539476)
Racket has had significant engineering and design time spent directly on the use case you describe. See this old thread from John Carmack about his son learning with Racket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10111479. Things have continued to improve since then as well.

From my own experience, it is absolutely possible to get good interaction with low latency in Racket, but of course as with any language you have to have enough experience to know how to avoid performance pitfalls.

For some of the gui work I've done I needed to mix threads and semaphores to get things to be really responsive when there could be a long running process triggered by a UI interaction, but in Racket it has been vastly easier and safer than in other languages.

Re:Racket: The Lisp for the Modern Day by bo-tato on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:48PM (#36640182)
In the annual lisp game jam it seems a lot of the submissions and the most polished ones are using fennel, which is a lisp that compiles to lua from the same creator of Janet. Then for lua (and fennel) there is high quality game engines LÖVE (2d games), TIC-80 (retro 2d), LÖVR (3d).