APL. The language that looks like someone sneezed onto a keyboard. The language that gave us the phrase “write-only code.” And now, somehow, the language that renders 3D voxel worlds.
A developer named Namgyaaal has dropped a game engine on GitHub that does exactly that: a voxel-based 3D engine written entirely in APL. If you’re not familiar with APL, here’s the short version: it’s a language from the 1960s, built around mathematical notation, and its programs often consist of dense strings of symbols that take an hour to parse. It’s the language your grandfather’s boss told him to learn because “computers are the future.”
And yet here it is, churning out voxel grids like a Minecraft clone written by a mad mathematician. The internet, predictably, is losing it. The Hacker News thread is full of people saying “this is cursed” and “I love it.” The discussion is short — only three comments as of writing — but the project itself has already racked up attention. Because it’s not just a stunt. It actually runs.
The Voxel Problem, Solved in Symbols
Voxel engines are computationally expensive. Every cube in a 3D world needs to be stored, rendered, and culled based on visibility. Most engines do this in C++, Rust, or at least something that compiles to machine code. APL, by contrast, is an interpreted array language. It’s not fast. It’s not close to the metal. It’s designed for manipulating matrices, not for real-time graphics.
But here’s the trick: APL’s array operations are vectorized. When you write a line of APL, it’s operating on entire arrays at once, not looping through elements one by one. That parallelism, even on a single CPU, can be surprisingly efficient for certain workloads. And voxel grids are fundamentally 3D arrays. So instead of writing nested loops to check each block, the APL engine uses a handful of symbols to slice, dice, and filter the entire world in one go.
“APL is a write-only language, but so is GPU shader code — and that runs on millions of cores.” — Anonymous Hacker News comment
The result is something that shouldn’t work but does. The engine renders a simple voxel landscape — blocks of earth, grass, stone — and lets you fly around it. The frame rate isn’t going to break any records, but it’s playable. And for a language that’s older than the moon landing, that’s remarkable.
Why APL Won’t Die
APL has a cult following that refuses to let it fade into the annals of computing history. It’s still used in financial modeling, actuarial work, and anywhere you need to process large tables of numbers quickly. Its modern descendant, Dyalog APL, has IDE support, a GUI framework, and a community of devotees who swear by its conciseness. “One line of APL equals fifty lines of Python” is a common boast. And they’re not wrong — if you can write that one line.
The problem is readability. An APL program looks like a permutation of alien hieroglyphs. The code for this voxel engine is no exception: it’s a single file of symbols that would make most developers reach for the nearest Excedrin. But that’s also part of the appeal. It’s an intellectual puzzle. Can you make something practical with a language that actively resists comprehension?
Namgyaaal’s answer is yes. The GitHub repo includes a short description and a link to a video of the engine running. It’s not a full game — no crafting, no enemies, no save files. But it proves a concept: APL can do real-time 3D. That’s like watching a typewriter play chess. It’s absurd, but you can’t look away.
The Beauty of Useless Projects
Let’s be honest: this will never become the next Unity. No one is going to build Baldur’s Gate 3 in APL. The learning curve is too steep, the syntax too alien, and the performance too limited for anything beyond a tech demo. But that’s not the point. The point is that someone looked at a language everyone dismissed and said, “I bet I can make it do something it was never meant to do.” And they did.
There’s a purity to that. In an industry obsessed with practicality, shipping products, and optimizing for the mainstream, a project like this is a breath of fresh air. It reminds us that programming is still a creative act. It’s not all ticket queues and sprint planning. Sometimes it’s just a person, a keyboard, and the stubborn belief that a 60-year-old language can render cubes.
The comments on Hacker News range from “This is an act of pure savagery” to “I want to see the framerate.” The GitHub stars are climbing. Someone will probably fork it and try to add lighting. Others will marvel and move on. But for a few days, this little APL engine is the talk of the internet — and rightfully so.
The Verdict
This project is a delightful anomaly. It’s not practical. It’s not scalable. It’s not even particularly useful. But it’s brilliant in the way that all art is brilliant: it forces you to reconsider what’s possible. APL isn’t dead. It’s waiting for someone weird enough to make it dance. And Namgyaaal just cranked the music.
Go look at the code. You won’t understand it. Neither will I. But that’s the joy of it. Some things aren’t meant to be understood — they’re meant to be admired.
