Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo

107K views · 3 years ago · demo · intermediate · evergreen

A demo of the in-house tools Tomorrow Corporation (World of Goo, Little Inferno) built for making games, shown by Allan Blomquist. It shows hot reloading of code and graphics, a time-travel debugger and replay of recorded play, all on a custom language and engine.

HN treats it as the ideal of a tight developer feedback loop and the closest thing to a perfect debugger.

“this demo has got to be the closest thing to the perfect debugger I've ever seen”

20 comments from Hacker News

m
@modernerd2024 · in “Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years”
Allan Blomquist's tooling demo they mention is incredible, go watch it: ▶ this video Really sells the value of having a tight developer feedback loop: it shows hot reloading for code and graphics, a reversible debugger, live profiling with flame graphs, a data inspector with data breakpoints, time travel inspection with a scrub bar, session sharing and replay with the same scrub bar and direct links from the call stack to a breakpoint, and more. Above the many niggles they had with Rust itself, this greatly helps me understand why Rust left them wanting more from their working environment. They say they've switched back to Unity with link to try to capture some of that, and now I see why. (It's a shame that hot reloading tooling in Rust wasn't ready for them yet, but I see why they've moved on instead of waiting/contributing.)
Strongly recommendsView on HN
_
@_gabe_2023 · in “What a good debugger can do”
> I should mention that the perfect debugger doesn’t exist It may not exist, but this demo has got to be the closest thing to the perfect debugger I've ever seen: ▶ this video
Strongly recommendsView on HN
s
@scrlk2026 · in “Show HN: C# Game Engine with its own scripting language and IDE”
Reminds me of the Tomorrow Corporation (developer of World of Goo) tech demo: ▶ this video Their entire stack is custom (language, compiler, IDE, build system, engine). Has neat features like time-travelling debugging and instant hot-reloading for code and assets.
RecommendsView on HN
s
@superdisk2026 · in “Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?”
This is a legitimate question but this was clearly generated using an LLM. To add something constructive, this demo represents an amazing ideal of what debugging could be: ▶ this video
RecommendsView on HN
t
@thundergolfer2026 · in “The most impressive 15min tech demo you've never seen [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
RecommendsView on HN
n
@nmilo2025 · in “Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
RecommendsView on HN
c
@chunkles2025 · in “Ask HN: What are your favourite session replay tools?”
The one used by Tomorrow Corporation for their game engine. ▶ this video
RecommendsView on HN
p
@plurby2025 · in “Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
RecommendsView on HN
G
@GranPC2025 · in “Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
RecommendsView on HN
L
@LipSchilling2024 · in “Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
RecommendsView on HN
M
@MikeSchurman2024 · in “GTFL – A Graphical Terminal for Common Lisp”
Yes, I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's work. I share his Inventing on Principle talk on a near yearly basis. I've seen light table years ago and thought it looked really neat, but I haven't looked into it much as it wasn't directly applicable to my environments. But, probably worth a look for ideas. On the topic of time-travel debugging, have you seen the demo: ▶ this video (Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo) Very impressive, worth a watch.
RecommendsView on HN
L
@Laremere2024 · in “Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel”
You may be interested in link or this tech demo from Tomorrow Corporation: ▶ this video
RecommendsView on HN