skaruts / game-of-life-in-multiple-languages

The result of me learning multiple languages/frameworks over time

Game of Life in Multiple Languages

I always make a Game of Life when learning a new language or framework, and since over the years I've jumped around between quite a few of them, eventually I ended up with a bunch of Games of Life made in a variety of languages and frameworks. Ultimately, it has also given me a first hand perspective of the difference in performance between the languages/frameworks.

I'm gathering them in this repo just for the heck of it, as I clean them up in my spare time.

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All versions except the TIC-80 (lua) are just a bare bones GoL. The TIC-80 version is a quite intricate one, with some fun drawing tools to play around with. All of them have a scalar variable m that can be given the values 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16, to make the cells bigger/smaller, respectively: m=1 makes cells of 16x16 pixels and an 80x50 grid, and m=16 makes cells of 1 pixel in a 1280x800 grid.

All of them use the same generation algorithm, which is the fastest among the simplest I could come up with so far. Maybe one day I'll manage to wrap my head around Tony Finch's algorithms or even hashlife, but for now this is the best I got. And I'm not unhappy with it.

On performance (the limits of reasonable performance):

• Cpp/Nim versions give me ~20fps with 1px cells, and ~60-70fps with 2px cells. They run like wild with larger cells. The C-Raylib version seemed slightly slower, but I haven't tested it much.

• Love2D gives me ~40fps with 4px cells.

• PySFML gives me ~60-70 with... 16px cells. (Pretty bad. Either I did something wrong or...)

• TIC-80 can't have a very large grid (240x136, maximum) and is slower by design, and gives me ~20fps with 1px cells (in this case the largest cells are 8px, so the scalar m can only go up to 8 for 1px cells).