I tried something similar with a roguelike I was prototyping last year. Ended up being more useful for finding edge cases than actual gameplay feedback - the agent would do things no human would ever try, like walking into walls repeatedly or hoarding useless items. Still caught a bunch of bugs I never would have found otherwise.

> Consider decoupling the core from Emacs, or packaging in a way that doesn’t require it as heavily.

but then we'd have to write an interface package to run it from emacs

How would it be run without Emacs?

You might point out that there are things like elisp.lisp that purports to run Emacs Lisp in Common Lisp, but I'm not sure that's viable for anything but trivial programs. There's also something for Guile, but I remain unconvinced.

Maybe a Common Lisp core with an Emacs frontend running it in https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/cl.html?

Why not just use the best known emacs lisp core, then? Like say emacs.

To allow it to run on other lisp dialects as well.

(I’m just trying to defend GP’s point – I’m not a heavy lisp user myself, tbh.)

Portability across Lisp dialects is usually not a thing. Even Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp which are arguably pretty close rarely if ever share code.

You could make a frontend for dialect A to run code from dialect B. Those things have been toyed with, but never really took off. E.g. cl in Emacs can not accept real Common Lisp code.

I'm not arguing against the idea, I'm just curious how it would work because I see no realistic way to do it.

Gotcha. Too bad – I was hoping there was at least some (non-trivial) subset you can run on both :(

Any idea why is it not a thing? Is this level of interop not practical for some reason?

Lisp dialects have diverged quite a bit, and it would be a lot of work to bridge the differences to a degree approaching 100%. 90% is easy, but only works for small trivial programs.

I say this, having written a "95%" Common Lisp for Emacs (still a toy), and successfully ran an old Maclisp compiler and assembler in Common Lisp.

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-cl

https://github.com/PDP-6/ITS-138/blob/master/tools/maclisp.l...

still in their main doc https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Emacs-Li...

Having read that, I'm even less convinced it's not more than a toy.

you could probably use the unexec tooling

I don't see how unexec would help with "decoupling the core from Emacs" since the core is written in Emacs Lisp.

you could make a standalone executable. I was assuming that people didn't want to start emacs to run it. if its just because...emacs is just morally offensive and one doesn't even want it running under the covers, I dont how to help you.

Emacs is needed because it provides Emacs Lisp.

If you used Emacs as a stand-alone game engine, at least it could make it claim it was "Reticulating Splines..." for a few minutes while it started up.

I kid, I kid! I love Emacs. I named my cat Emacs!

I mean, i dont mind it but having a client/server architecture is a very different story to just 2 elisp modules.

Here, the point was to have everything in emacs completely, and also see if the architectural contraints make sense for elisp (and they do)

And have some fun, of course.