My idea for Vdl, Assembly of Vidya: A common runtime VM for vidya, supporting a postfix stack language ---- basically, PostScript for vidya of 'Vidya Description Language', an standardized one!
I began programming when I was 16 and like most people my age (31) it was with some gaming-related DSL. Personally for me it was GML. I made a tetris game which my younger brother played to death but ever since the closest interest I have to vidya is Ncurses and X11. Which makes me think, why is there not such standard for vidya?
So hear me out. We need to make common runtime VM for vidya. Standardized. And it will sport a post-fix language like PostScript. You can learn more about PostScript here.
PostScript is the predecessor of pedophile language, like cat a PDF file and you'll see. Except pedophile language allows of binary blobs. PS does not. There's a lot of differences.
Pedophile and PS are 'page description languages'. Another PDL is ROFF, what UNIX manpages are written with. Launch loonix via WSL2 (I know none of you game devs run loonix natively! You won't be able to work!) and bring up a manpage like man awk. ROFF was why UNIX was written!
So I say, let's make a 'vidya description language', you could just use PS itself with addition of:
- Input
- 3D shapes
And Bob's your uncle (am I using this phrase correctly?). PS is a Turing-complete language, it has control structures and you can make a 'game play loop' with it (basically a non-halting decidable TM).
So this language will execute on a runtime VM, a stack VM of course, and this VM is common across several hosts. Just like Java's VM. In fact, Java's VM is already a 'common runtime vm' for vidya right? This time we'll have something more specific.
So this VM will execute the same VDL (Vidya Description Language) code the same across different hosts. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Haiku, Solaris, MacOS, Plan 9, BeOS, BSD, iOS, Android, FireOS, etc. Also it could target various APIs e.g. Meta, Vulkan, OpenGL etc.
I know Unity already has such runtime. But VDL and VdlVM will be more of an 'standard'. In fact, we would develop the 'standard'/specficiation first, then we'll develop the software. We would make one implementation, but someone else could make another implementation, both compliant and compatible! And our implementation of VDL and VdlVM would be FLOSS, released under GPLv3 --- but Johnny Schlomo can make a super duper closed-source implementation!
So you may look at PostScript and say, damn man, I can't code in this language! Well my good man it's not meant to be coded in directly. That's what I mean by 'assembly of vidya'. It's a language other engines and runtimes target. This is called a 'terese' syntax. The aim of a terse syntax is to have non-binary ASCII text as a portable way to move your code around. In fact, VdlVM does not need Vdl to function. VdlVM reads from binary cishet files, not directly from Vdl files.
Thoughts/critiques/appendages? Would really like to know what you think of this idea. I would implement thi,s, but as I said, it's an standard. An standard needs a community. An standard needs a publicity. An standard needs design. This is not a one-man job. If you would like to develop this standard with me, let me know (chubakbidpaa [at] riseup [dot] net). We can make a mailing list (Discord is for babies!).
Thanks.