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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I played it for about 70 hours like 8 months ago, and quite enjoyed it. Will definitely go back, at some point, to see what’s been improved. There’s a REALLY solid foundation there, I think. I like to say it’s the factorio/automation genre, but distilled down to nothing but the gameplay, in its purest, most-concentrated form. My wife and son picked it back up immediately today, when they realized the big update dropped.

    One thing they’ve talked about doing is improving the high-level progression. Specifically, they said their concept for better progression will be that milestone products will feed into future milestones, rather than having them just get thrown away, just like you describe. Not sure if that’s made it into the game yet, or not.

    For $25 in Early Access, I think it’s a deal. If you’re really worried about there being enough gameplay/progression to keep you interested, wishlist it, and keep an eye on what the updates are adding.








  • Honestly, if you’re having trouble finding stuff for vanilla JS, I’d recommend looking at jQuery. Not that you should USE jQuery, necessarily, but the library is basically a giant wrapper around all the native JS APIs, so the approach to building stuff is essentially the same: it all focuses on tracking and manipulation of DOM elements.

    I do vanilla JS (actually TypeScript) dev at work, daily, and that was my big takeaway from spearheding our team’s migration from jQuery to vanilla TypeScript: I honestly don’t know what benefit jQuery provides, over vanilla, because all the most-common jQuery APIs that we were using have a 1:1 native equivalent.

    We do also use 2 third-party libraries alongside vanilla, so I’l mention those: require.js and rx.js. Require you probably don’t need, with modern JS having bundling and module support built-in but we still use it for legacy reasons. But rx.js is a huge recommend, for me. Reactive programming is the IDEAL way to build GUIs, in my opinion.





  • I’m gonna hazard a guess, just cause I’m curious, that you’re coming from JavaScript.

    Regardless, the answer’s basically the same across all similar languages where this question makes sense. That is, languages that are largely, if not completely, object-oriented, where memory is managed for you.

    Bottom line, object allocation is VERY expensive. Generally, objects are allocated on a heap, so the allocation process itself, in its most basic form, involves walking some portion of a linked list to find an available heap block, updating a header or other info block to track that the block is now in use, maybe sub-dividing the block to avoid wasting space, any making any updates that might be necessary to nodes of the linked list that we traversed.

    THEN, we have to run similar operations later for de-allocation. And if we’re talking about a memory-managed language, well, that means running a garbage collector algorithm, periodically, that needs to somehow inspect blocks that are in use to see if they’re still in use, or can be automatically de-allocated. The most common garbage-collector I know of involves tagging all references within other objects, so that the GC can start at the “root” objects and walk the entire tree of references within references, in order to find any that are orphaned, and identify them as collectable.

    My bread and butter is C#, so let’s look at an actual example.

    public class MyMutableObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    }
    
    public record MyImmutableObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; init; }
    
        public required string Name { get; init; }
    }
    
    _immutableInstance = new()
    {
        Id      = 1,
        Name    = "First"
    };
    
    _mutableInstance = new()
    {
        Id      = 1,
        Name    = "First"
    };
    
    [Benchmark(Baseline = true)]
    public MyMutableObject MutableEdit()
    {
        _mutableInstance.Name = "Second";
    
        return _mutableInstance;
    }
    
    [Benchmark]
    public MyImmutableObject ImmutableEdit()
        => _immutableInstance with
        {
            Name = "Second"
        };
    
    Method Mean Error StdDev Ratio RatioSD Gen0 Allocated Alloc Ratio
    MutableEdit 1.080 ns 0.0876 ns 0.1439 ns 1.02 0.19 - - NA
    ImmutableEdit 8.282 ns 0.2287 ns 0.3353 ns 7.79 1.03 0.0076 32 B NA

    Even for the most basic edit operation, immutable copying is slower by more than 7 times, and (obviously) allocates more memory, which translates to more cost to be spent on garbage collection later.

    Let’s scale it up to a slightly-more realistic immutable data structure.

    public class MyMutableParentObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    
        public required MyMutableChildObject Child { get; set; }
    }
    
    public class MyMutableChildObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    
        public required MyMutableGrandchildObject FirstGrandchild { get; set; }
                
        public required MyMutableGrandchildObject SecondGrandchild { get; set; }
                
        public required MyMutableGrandchildObject ThirdGrandchild { get; set; }
    }
    
    public class MyMutableGrandchildObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    }
    
    public record MyImmutableParentObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    
        public required MyImmutableChildObject Child { get; set; }
    }
    
    public record MyImmutableChildObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    
        public required MyImmutableGrandchildObject FirstGrandchild { get; set; }
                
        public required MyImmutableGrandchildObject SecondGrandchild { get; set; }
                
        public required MyImmutableGrandchildObject ThirdGrandchild { get; set; }
    }
    
    public record MyImmutableGrandchildObject
    {
        public required ulong Id { get; set; }
    
        public required string Name { get; set; }
    }
    
    _immutableTree = new()
    {
        Id      = 1,
        Name    = "Parent",
        Child   = new()
        {
            Id                  = 2,
            Name                = "Child",
            FirstGrandchild     = new()
            {
                Id      = 3,
                Name    = "First Grandchild"
            },
            SecondGrandchild    = new()
            {
                Id      = 4,
                Name    = "Second Grandchild"
            },
            ThirdGrandchild     = new()
            {
                Id      = 5,
                Name    = "Third Grandchild"
            },
        }
    };
    
    _mutableTree = new()
    {
        Id      = 1,
        Name    = "Parent",
        Child   = new()
        {
            Id                  = 2,
            Name                = "Child",
            FirstGrandchild     = new()
            {
                Id      = 3,
                Name    = "First Grandchild"
            },
            SecondGrandchild    = new()
            {
                Id      = 4,
                Name    = "Second Grandchild"
            },
            ThirdGrandchild     = new()
            {
                Id      = 5,
                Name    = "Third Grandchild"
            },
        }
    };
    
    [Benchmark(Baseline = true)]
    public MyMutableParentObject MutableEdit()
    {
        _mutableTree.Child.SecondGrandchild.Name = "Second Grandchild Edited";
    
        return _mutableTree;
    }
    
    [Benchmark]
    public MyImmutableParentObject ImmutableEdit()
        => _immutableTree with
        {
            Child = _immutableTree.Child with
            {
                SecondGrandchild = _immutableTree.Child.SecondGrandchild with
                {
                    Name = "Second Grandchild Edited"
                }
            }
        };
    
    Method Mean Error StdDev Ratio RatioSD Gen0 Allocated Alloc Ratio
    MutableEdit 1.129 ns 0.0840 ns 0.0825 ns 1.00 0.10 - - NA
    ImmutableEdit 32.685 ns 0.8503 ns 2.4534 ns 29.09 2.95 0.0306 128 B NA

    Not only is performance worse, but it drops off exponentially, as you scale out the size of your immutable structures.


    Now, all this being said, I myself use the immutable object pattern FREQUENTLY, in both C# and JavaScript. There’s a lot of problems you encounter in business logic that it solves really well, and it’s basically the ideal type of data structure for use in reactive programming, which is extremely effective for building GUIs. In other words, I use immutable objects a ton when I’m building out the business layer of a UI, where data is king. If I were writing code within any of the frameworks I use to BUILD those UIs (.NET, WPF, ReactiveExtensions) you can bet I’d be using immutable objects way more sparingly.