podcast

Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

15.11.2025
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Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with Richard about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers.


Keynote & Tech Demo - https://youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQ

ECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk

"The 30 Million Line Problem" - https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk

"A New Programming Language for Games" - https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzB

Roc Programming Language - https://roc-lang.org

Casey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware

File Pilot File Explorer - https://filepilot.tech/

Ghostty Terminal - https://ghostty.org/

Language Server Protocol - https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

WebAssembly Integer Sizes - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference/Numeric/Const

Cliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - https://github.com/SeaOfNodes/


Chapters

The Programming Establishment

Metaprogramming

Compile-Time Execution

Language Feature Interoperability

Compile Time Execution

Cross-Compiling and FFI

Determinism in Programming

Balancing Power and Safety

Memory Safety vs. Performance

The Evolution of Software Performance

Performance Awareness

Dependencies and Version Control

Dependency Availability Risk

Memory Management

Sandboxing

Operating Systems


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