relational design

[Raoul Duke]

There's lots of systems that seem to allow the developer to end up
with a rat's nest of references and ownership. Some game programming
libraries are especially so e.g. flixel and derivatives thereof have
various kinds of containers and sprites which can go in them, then
have groups to hold lots of similar such sprites for performance
optimization, and then also have inheritance in the mix, and then also
have bad documentation.

Thus as a developer trying to use the library, good luck trying to not
use it "wrong" which of course doesn't even always immediately give
you runtime let alone static errors; maybe you just get memory leaks,
and shyeah just try and profile it.

I think this kind of problem exists almost everywhere in programming,
but game engines certainly seem to be extremely extreme examples that
highlight the problems.

What are the best ways to design ownership? What can be done with
static type checking? What can be done with runtime assertions in
debug mode? What can be done just from an api standpoint?

Why are we so bad as both a science and an industry at these basic,
recurring, fundamental, important problems?

[Mike Austin]

Rust? Smart pointers? If trying to manage manually, yeah, good luck.