Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

Software Unscripted Podcast November 15, 2025
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Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with host Richard Feldman about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers. Enjoying Software Unscripted? You can become a supporter on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted 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 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/ 00:00 The Programming Establishment 02:04 Metaprogramming 05:04 Compile-Time Execution 08:05 Language Feature Interoperability 10:53 Compile Time Execution 27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI 31:04 Determinism in Programming 35:07 Balancing Power and Safety 40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance 50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance 55:32 Performance Awareness 01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control 01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk 01:18:42 Memory Management 01:24:51 Sandboxing 01:30:23 Operating Systems