Is there a variant of Prolog that is less dynamic with AoT compilation?
Imagine if you can be in "dynamic mode" where you can add rules, facts, etc. in an adhoc way.
Then, once your game is better defined, you can compile the Prolog to native code so that it is highly optimized, executed in parallel, etc. The compiler could apply all sorts of optimizations we see in commercial game engines automatically.
This compiled object could then be embedded into a game engine with native performance.
Done right, this could even outperform imperative game engines, but be very easy to debug and modify.
So much of the "magic" with Prolog and similar relational languages necessarily happens with dynamic data at runtime (especially in a game engine where entities move around, etc so the state of relations changes significantly) I'm not sure how much static you could get with it.
That said, there's plenty of research in the DB world on precompiled and JITted query execution plans. All of that would apply to a Prolog or Datalog engine as well.
Also, a personal interest of mine I keep wanting to come back to is how much one can make use of GPU and TPU hardware to accelerate the joins that go on in these systems. There are people working in this space already: https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02206v3 but I believe their emphasis is on large scale data sets (e.g. big data graphs) whereas I'm curious to see if there's a way that an approach using HW acceleration could make low latency "OLTP" type applications possible for applications like robotics/vehicle autonomy/games, using complex rule sets.
I watch my son play Dwarf Fortress and I'm like... it needs a Prolog.
The most similar thing to a "static" Prolog would be Mercury[0] or Turbo Prolog[1]. OTOH, if you want an embed-able logic programming library there is the mini/microKanren family[2].
Comments
Is there a variant of Prolog that is less dynamic with AoT compilation?
Imagine if you can be in "dynamic mode" where you can add rules, facts, etc. in an adhoc way.
Then, once your game is better defined, you can compile the Prolog to native code so that it is highly optimized, executed in parallel, etc. The compiler could apply all sorts of optimizations we see in commercial game engines automatically.
This compiled object could then be embedded into a game engine with native performance.
Done right, this could even outperform imperative game engines, but be very easy to debug and modify.
So much of the "magic" with Prolog and similar relational languages necessarily happens with dynamic data at runtime (especially in a game engine where entities move around, etc so the state of relations changes significantly) I'm not sure how much static you could get with it.
That said, there's plenty of research in the DB world on precompiled and JITted query execution plans. All of that would apply to a Prolog or Datalog engine as well.
Also, a personal interest of mine I keep wanting to come back to is how much one can make use of GPU and TPU hardware to accelerate the joins that go on in these systems. There are people working in this space already: https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02206v3 but I believe their emphasis is on large scale data sets (e.g. big data graphs) whereas I'm curious to see if there's a way that an approach using HW acceleration could make low latency "OLTP" type applications possible for applications like robotics/vehicle autonomy/games, using complex rule sets.
I watch my son play Dwarf Fortress and I'm like... it needs a Prolog.
The most similar thing to a "static" Prolog would be Mercury[0] or Turbo Prolog[1]. OTOH, if you want an embed-able logic programming library there is the mini/microKanren family[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(programming_language)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Prolog
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniKanren