Neil Fraser

For the past decade I've been a software engineer at Google in California. In my spare time I've created a mélange of open-source software. I've also built some rather unusual hardware. On rare occasions I've even been known to write something interesting.

JavaScript Chain Reaction Saturday, 27 February 2021

[Chain Reaction] More than twenty years ago I wrote a strategy game in Visual Basic 3. It worked well, but with the increase in malware people became shy about downloading executables.

The solution was to port it to a Java applet so that it could be played anyone in a browser. Java was advertised as "write once, run everywhere". Of course the reality was that the game broke with every new release of Java, then died completely when Java was stripped from web browsers.

My third attempt is to port the game to JavaScript, using SVG. Chain Reaction is now a part of Beaver Games, along with two other new games, Connect and Maze. How stable do you think this version will be? In another twenty years, will it still be playable? Or will I need to port it to Swift, then to Quantum Ruby, then to Rust X-treme?

I'm getting tired of repeatedly redoing my work just to maintain the status quo.

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