Verse (coding)
Programming language developed by Epic Games for Unreal Engine and UEFN
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Verse is a programming language that was developed by Epic Games for programming in UEFN, a game development software used to create player-made games in Fortnite, and Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by Epic Games. Verse was first implemented in UEFN on March 23, 2023, and it is the main scripting language for UEFN and Unreal Engine.[1]
| Verse | |
|---|---|
| |
| Paradigm | Multi-paradigm (functional, imperative) |
| Designed by | Epic Games |
| Developer | Epic Games |
| First appeared | 2023 |
| Typing discipline | Static, strong |
| Platform | Unreal Editor for Fortnite |
| OS | Windows (via Fortnite Launcher) |
| License | Proprietary |
Verse was created along with UEFN by Epic Games with the aim of creating a programming language that allows UEFN creators to develop complex games and systems for the Fortnite Multiverse. Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[2] Conceived by Tim Sweeney,[3] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the Fortnite metaverse.[4] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[5]
History
The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference. It is avaliable to all Unreal Engine users. [1]
References
- "Dive into Epic's announcements from GDC 2023". Unreal Engine. March 23, 2023. Archived from the original on March 23, 2023. Retrieved March 23, 2023.
- Peyton Jones, Simon (November 5, 2021). "An Epic future for SPJ". Haskell Community Discourse. Archived from the original on May 20, 2022. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
- "Interview with Simon Peyton Jones". Haskell Foundation. March 25, 2022. Archived from the original on March 27, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
So Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic and he is a computer scientist and has been interested in programming for a long time. So he knows about Haskell and loves Haskell actually. So I think that's why he thought of people like me and Lennart and was keen to have us. But Verse isn't a Haskell clone by any means. It's a language that Tim has been designing sort of in his head actually for – I don't really quite know how long, I should ask him – around a decade. So it's informed by functional programming and imperative programming and game programming and logic programming. There's a lot going on in Verse. Lennart's and my job is to sort of reverse engineer Verse out of tim's head and get it set down in a kind of formal semantics that everybody else can make make sense of.
- "Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language (Simon Peyton Jones)". YouTube. 2022-12-12. Archived from the original on December 12, 2022. Retrieved December 12, 2022.
- Augustsson, Lennart; Breitner, Joachim; Claessen, Koen; Jhala, Ranjit; Peyton Jones, Simon; Shivers, Olin; Steele, Guy; Sweeney, Tim (March 2023). "The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming" (PDF). Simon.PeytonJones.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 15, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.