Design of an optimized compiler for Casanova language

Abstract

Making games is a complex, time-consuming and expensive task, since a game is made of several inter-operating components. For this reason developers having few resources at their disposal (i.e. researchers or independent developers) are discouraged in developing such games using standard languages (such as C++) and libraries (DirectX, OpenGL or XNA in .NET environment). The aim of this work is defining a language oriented to developing games which allows the aforementioned category of developers to realize a game or a real-time simulation in a short amount of time, with a more synthetic code and in a more expressive way, with a good trade-off on performances. We will start examining the older version of Casanova, which is interpreted, and we will examine its flaws and present an improvement. Then we will present the structure of the compiler itself, based on F# compiler. Our work shows the execution time improvement with respect to the older Casanova version, as well as the expressiveness and conciseness of the code with respect to an alternative implementation in XNA.