My friend and I are in the early stages of creating a domain-specific language for gaming programming for his dissertation.
The language will be quite low, it will have type C syntax, additional garbage collection and will be oriented to systems with small memory or processing power (for example, Nintendo DS), but should be strong enough to facilitate the development of PCs. It will not be a scripting language, but a compiled one, but since we do not want to spend months writing a regular compiler, the first implementation will basically be a LanguageName-to-C translator with TCC or GCC as the end of the compiler.
Now I have a question for all your programmers:
What would you like to see in such a language? What functions, implementation, and syntax would be best for this? What should i avoid?
Edit:
Some things that we have already come up with:
- state-based objects - an object can exist in one of its states (or sub-states)
- events and functions - events should not exist for a call and may bubble
- limited dynamic allocation and pointer support - we want it to be as safe as possible
- support for the layout of objects (the Hero is composed (dynamically) of the Actor, Held, Managed, etc.).
- "resources" in states loaded and unloaded automatically at the beginning / end of a state (for example, an OpenGL texture object is a resource)
- basic support for localization and serialization
- syntax that quickly parses
- : , (,
function retType name(type arg) is (qualifier, list) { }; const, static, public -, ) ..