cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/1086370
This time on my arbitrary blog: Entity component systems.
Also, highlight.js should degrade more gracefully without JS activated than last time. Note that I can’t process syntax highlighting in my build step, because I don’t have a build step.
I don’t think most people do to be honest, I was providing it as reference because it’s a strongly typed ECS. One of the other challenges with scripts is they often don’t have static type checkers since they’re intended to be executed right away. mypy and TypeScript have helped tremendously with Python and JavaScript, but they’re still extra steps that need to be executed before you can run your code.
An embedded interpreter can still be highly performant, assuming it has a decent JIT compiler. Sending data between the host and the interpreter would be a concern, but it might be possible to allow the script to share memory with the host and directly access the components (while holding locks on those components’ storages). I tried experimenting with this a while back using WASI, but unfortunately the runtimes I played with (wasmer + wasmtime) weren’t yet mature enough from my experience to be realistically useful, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the modules to share memory with each other.
I know there are people playing around with scripting capabilities in bevy though, so I’m sure this will be possible at some point. The other challenge, of course, is having a scheduler that’s flexible enough to handle dynamically added/removed systems, and systems which execute runtime-specified queries.
Edit: I should add that a large part of the performance of an ECS comes from the ability of an ECS runtime to parallelize the systems. If your interpreter can execute the systems in parallel, then you still get to keep that benefit as long as your scheduler knows which systems are safe to run in parallel.