I was just watching a video from Jonathan Blow (the developer of a really
popular game named Braid) on a new language he’s working on to get around all
the cruft and slowness in c++ for making games. One the problems he identifies
is poor memory layout using object oriented inheritance and arrays of structs.
His proposal was to make it easier to build linked lists in structs that can
access tightly packed arrays of continuous memory for fields that are iterated
often and susceptible to cache misses. The solution he came up with is really
brilliant in my opinion and even though he used the keyword “using” it’s
basically like “with” in Pascal.
I never use “with” normally but this is an extremely interesting idea and I
wonder if it would be compatible with how “with” works in FPC now. Is any of
this functionality possible using “with"? Curious what anyone thinks about
this, providing my explanation makes any sense.
type
TEntity = record
position: TVec2;
end;
TEntityPtr = ^TEntity;
type
TDoor = record
with entity: TEntityPtr; // import entity namespace for entire
TDoor scope
state: boolean;
end;
var
door: TDoor;
begin
door.entity := GetAvailableEntity; // pop an entity from storage
door.position := V2(1, 1); // entity is “with” so we get
access to its members (door.entity^.position)
// works with function parameters also.
// this is almost like a class helper or at very least mimics “self” in methods.
procedure OpenDoor(with var door: TDoor);
begin
state := true; // with imports door namespace into entire function scope
end;
Regards,
Ryan Joseph
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