Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn’t actually build the cars

The real question is how we got any portable solution to this problem in the first place.

To me problems are fundamentally economic and political, not technical. For example, the unique circumstances that led to a portable web standard involved multiple major interventions against Microsoft by antitrust regulators (in 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013, etc). The other tech giants were happy to go along with this as a way to break microsoft’s monopoly. Very soon after, Google and Apple put the walls straight back up with mobile apps.

If you go back before HTML, OS research was progressing swiftly towards portable, high-level networked GUI technology via stuff like smalltalk. Unfortunately all of the money was mysteriously pulled from those research groups after Apple and Microsoft stole all the smalltalk research and turned it into a crude walled garden of GUI apps, then started printing money faster than the US Mint.

Whenever you see progress towards portable solutions, such as Xamarin and open source C#, React Native, or even Flutter, it is usually being funded by a company that lost a platform war and is now scrambling to build some awkward metaplatform on top of everyone else’s stuff. It never really works.

One exception is webassembly, which was basically forced into existence against everyone’s will by some ingenious troublemakers at Mozilla. That’s a whole other story though!

I mentioned it elsewhere here but I think the Terra research language has explored this area more thoroughly than Rust, just because that’s its only purpose. The website and academic papers are definitely worth a skim: https://terralang.org/

It’s basically a powerful LLVM-based compilation library exposed where everything is exposed through Lua bindings. The default Terra compiler is just a Lua script that you can pull apart, extend, rearrange, etc. It’s all designed for ease of experimentation, whereas Rust has to worry about being a rock-solid production compiler.

Honourable mention to C# source generators too. They are janky as hell but very effective.

If I understood correctly, the closest thing I know of to what you are describing is probably Terra:

https://terralang.org/

It is an academic project with various papers presenting case studies that do things like change the whole programming paradigm the language, or the execution model, or the syntax.

The wider paradigm is called multi-stage programming. The other obvious languages to mention are the lisp family, and more recent spin-offs like Julia.

LLVM is ironically a very slow compiler back-end, whose popularity has contributed to a general slow-down in compilation speed across the whole industry (it’s even slow at doing debug builds for fast iteration).

WASM has some promise though

This is just like, my opinion, but here you go:

If you live in the western sphere, the US tech giants control half of your critical infrastructure and invade every aspect of your personal and professional life. If you live outside the US, they do not answer to you or to anyone you can vote for. They lean on your government for permission to turn your whole existence into a series of transactions, and then extract as much value as possible from each one. The money doesn’t swirl around your community making everyone richer. Instead, 5% goes to pay a few nice salaries in your biggest city, and the rest of it gets funneled straight out of the country and into california.

Even Europe - their imperial mentor and favourite uncle - is treated like shit. Europe built half of their technology but controls none of it. There is not a single european tech giant. Every last one is american, with extensive ties to the US government and security apparatus.

Three things off the top of my head:

• Unionisation
• Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
• Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.

You could write a compiler for a low-level language in anything. Honestly makes little sense that most people do it in C++ when they’re only going to replace it anyway.

Yeah it’s a super hard problem, but my point is that in the specific case of a city building game most of the models are going to be extremely small on the screen 90% of the time, so you can get away with pretty terrible automated LOD in a way you can’t in most other genres; you just don’t swap to low-poly versions until stuff is extremely far away.

You’re right, but you totally could make a game engine generate LOD levels for you. Especially for a game like this, where you could get away with a very crude LOD simplifier for tiny, distant objects.

In their case they can probably plug some open source library into their unity asset pipeline without much difficulty.

Honestly I’m just surprised they implemented so much complex stuff but didn’t fix something so basic. Makes me wonder whether these blogs have correctly diagnosed the problem.