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Jonathan Blow - Jai Demo and Design Explanation (KEYNOTE) - Updated

LambdaConf

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 2 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters, 1 in engineering communities and 1 curated list.
  • Presented by Jonathan Blow

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

241K views1 year ago5 recommendations

Programming languagesGame developmentLanguage design and type systemsGame programmingPerformance and optimization

Jonathan Blow demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains the design decisions behind its metaprogramming and visualization tools.

#LambdaConf2025 took place in Estes Park Colorado this past May 12th and 13th. UPCOMING EVENT: The Ultimate Coder Casting call: docs.google.com/forms/d/1X6xqghfFNU3QRgbcrzgYPYTfBZtGEU0VvRG… Learn about the sponsors that made it happen: Ziverge Transformative Tech for Modern Challenges ziverge.com/ Urbit Foundation Leave the Internet Behind urbit.org/ Golem Cloud Deploy secure AI apps that run reliably golem.cloud/ Platonic Systems Solving your toughest software problems platonic.systems/ Abstract for this talk: The 'jai' programming language was designed in a very reality-based way to solve specific problems that we had when developing very complex software (in our case, video games). We'll demo some features of the language and explain why design decisions were made the way they were.

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5 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its demonstration of Jai's compile-time capabilities, profiling tools, and pragmatic language design philosophy.

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damantisshrimpon Lobsters • Recommends

Jai Demo and Design Explanation
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u/typesanitizerin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends

Jai Demo & Design: Compile-time and run-time profiling
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programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends

Under “Programming Language Design”

Jai Demo and Design Explanation 01:13:00 by **Jonathan Blow** (2025)
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sothatsiton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs”

AI building complex visualisations for you on-the-fly seems like a great use-case. For example, if you are debugging memory leaks in a specific code path, you could get AI to write a visualisation of all the memory allocations and frees under that code path to help you identify the problem. This opens up an interesting new direction where building visualisations to debug specific problems is probably becoming viable. This idea reminds me of Jonathan Blow's recent talk at LambdaConf. In it, he shows a tool he made to visualise his programs in different ways to help with identifying potential problems. I could imagine AI being good at building these. The talk: link to this video
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matthewkayinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles”

> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it. I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up. In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down it…
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baranulon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke”

There is also the fact of newer "closer to C" alternatives like C31 and Zen C2, or more intriguing C family alternatives such as Odin3, Jai4, or Vlang5. Zig is kind of trapped. It can't go "head to head" with heavy weights like Rust, who specialize in safety, are more mature (post 1.0), and have lots of corporate support. Then there are the other C alternatives, who each offer something it doesn't have. It appears the only way for it to maintain its position, is through heavy hype and marketing, but the whole Bun ordeal and extensive beta issues are subtracting from any such attempts. 1: link 2: link 3: link 4: link to this video 5: link
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