John Carmack: Script Interpreters Considered Harmful

Am quite looking forward to the Doom 3 source code release. My expertise isn't in gaming but getting a chance to peek under the hood of a commercial mass market game will be a learning experience to say the least. If they ever do it that is. This isn't the 1st time Carmack has promised "teh source codez". Holding my breath...

FWIW most of Firefox's UI and suck is written in JS and it is a rather large project...

Excuse me... I may not have read you correctly here, but, did you mention ActionScript as a LIGHTWEIGHT language? Fuck you. Really. Lua is lightweight, but ActionScript DEFINITELY IS NOT.

Lua is way faster than ActionScript (even without using LuaJIT, which is many times faster again), and Flash uses software rendering to draw GUIs. There are lots of reasons you wouldn't want to use Flash in a game.

Lua is used in hundreds of games because it IS really fast, and you can use whatever abstractions you want in it. It's a really powerful and flexible language. People can abuse it, but you can also write extremely elegant code that executes nearly as fast as C/C++.

So rather than "scripting languages are evil," the only real take-away here is the Flash sucks. Which all real game programmers knew already (likely Carmack included, though he seems to have underestimated the degree of suck).

@Markus: the comparison is to C or C++ so yes, ActionScript is lightweight.

Uhm, Carmack promised code a lot of times and delivered. Not his fault that the engine is still being licensed for very recent games and there being some legal hold-ups until now with the D3 one.

FWIW most of Firefox's UI and suck is written in JS and it is a rather large project...

And that is precisely the reason why the browser performs with the zeal of an overfed, paraplegic cow.

Woah here come the Flash-suck-trolls... AS, LUA whatever: Carmack's problem is that these are not good-enough scripting languages because he didn't write their VM himself and he can't use static code analysis tools & stuff to be sure code is optimal.

For what is worth games usually use ScaleForm which is a runtime somewhat compatible with Flash but nothing really like Flash Player - also it's coded in AS2 which, like LUA and unlike AS3, isn't strongly and doesn't offer any code analysis tools.

LUA = Lua Uppercase Accident?

Lua is strongly-typed. You probably mean statically typed?

Personally I'm surprised to hear such a broad statement from Carmack. A number of interpreted languages - namely those with a good JIT - are very close to the performance level of C++ now. LuaJIT in particular is pretty amazing and others are getting better like Pypy (and hopefully someday Rubinius or something). It's true though that execution speed can be somewhat inconsistent and difficult to predict, though.

He also mentions two important things:

1. That having non-programmers write code is a Bad Idea
2. That we'd "like" to have a "Strip Down C++" to work with.

Strip down C++ dialect: yes please.

"They typically lack the code-reuse abstractions and development toolsets, not to mention the runtime characteristics, that make large-scale development feasible."

This statement is false. Counterexample is Python, which has all of the above.

Guys. We should view his statements in the context: big game projects. It's not hard to imagine that breadth and duration of the project minimizing benefits of script languages and maximizing management cost.

Keep in mind that JC's idea of a "scripting" language is interpreted subsets of c and c++. To my mind, it's extremely likely such languages will end up with the worst of both, vs using something like lua.

Ugh.

Let's break this down:

1) Doom 3 was essentially "pop in a box" that relied heavily on scripted events to provide "tension / fear" and "game play". Oh.. I've opened an "object" or used an "object" ... what are the chances that you just scripted a pop up spawn behind me? HEAVY. The real issue isn't language, it is engine constraints. We get that modern games have moved from Doom open maps to Black-Ops "scripted events along a pretty tunnel" but... Both are doing it wrong, and need to die out.

Comment - this isn't a problem with the language, this is a problem with design.

2) LUA. LUA is fucking magic pixie land if you know what you're doing. LUA was first used in games and now is being used in... Oh. Ok. If you're reading this, you should be educated, and in touch, right? Then go find out which companies are using LUA for non-games, then come back with your tails between your legs. [Disclosure - used LUA in its infancy, and saw the potential right away].

Comment: A decent GUI engine + pre-made LUA scripts CAN allow non-coders to make games. Fact. Proof? Hmm.. $500mil+ in sales says I'm right.

3) At some point, the 90's cease to matter. As do the 00's. It is 2011 now. Carmack hasn't produced a groundbreaking game / engine in ... 10+ years. He looks like a meth addict. Why are you still listening to a person who personally did DaiKatana, and Doom III was a flop? Remind me why he's relevant now? Unreal Engine kinda won the battle (along the lines of "Oasis vrs Blur" in the 90's)

Comment: Stop crying, make a decent game this decade. I dare you. OH....

Disclosure: Anachronox was the best game ID never made. If you've not played it, then GTFO and don't bother commenting.

p.s.

Your code is fracking insane. Correct tags => insane issues. Blog is retarded. Grats.

Third try now. Nice to know that "modern" blogs not only badly format proper HTML, but also rape to death < and > etc etc.

/fail

I've been following this site for about a year and you sir have a way of phrasing things that polarizes people. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, but I've seen far worse writers get far more praise and take a lot less flack. Not one tech writer out there bothered to listen to the keynote in its entirety or they would've been all over this. If they did listen, they didn't know enough about programming to understand why the quote you isolated would be interesting to a programmer. Thanks for a great little discussion and for whetting my interest in game programming for a 2nd time.

Christ people, the title is a reference to GOTO Considered Harmful a famous opinion paper by Dijkstra. He's not actually saying that script interpreters are harmful what are they teaching you kids in CS these days? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

This guy is so overcome by his celebrity, he believes his own BS. You are better off using programmers to code games. Deep! We needed that bit of arcane wisdom.

Notice how he has a really, really bad case of console envy. Instead of producing a decent follow up to the DOOM franchise, he is working on a console like rail shooter type game.

When they dispense with the creatives, i.e. writers for storyline and plot development, you basically get console tunnel creeps like Rage sounds more and more like it is going to be.

You are probably misinterpreting what Carmack said. I saw it a while ago and I remember him saying in "in retrospect" and "what we learned is" several times.

This time is about what he thinks now. Not about what they did it in the past. It's a talk about if you had to do it again, how differently would you do it. And he even mentioned "contraints", "small teams".

Listen to a bunch of people who couldn't build a 2D asteroids criticize the man who singlehandedly invented modern FPSes...seriously...what have you guys ever built?

Hmm

@Jason You don't actually know who you're talking about, do you? Carmack never touched Daikatana. That whole post was embarrassing...

You actually don't have to wait until the Doom 3 source code is released to see "what's what," the source code to the entire scripting system is in the gamecode, which means you can grab the Doom 3 SDK and look at it right now.

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