Game Oriented Assembly Lisp

Game Oriented Assembly Lisp, usually called GOAL, is a Lisp dialect written for video games by Andy Gavin and the Jak and Daxter team at Naughty Dog. Its compiler was itself written in Allegro Common Lisp, and it was used across the Jak and Daxter series. Its syntax resembles Scheme, but it favours an imperative style, with classes, inheritance and virtual functions added. GOAL is not interpreted: it compiles straight to PlayStation 2 machine code, allows inline assembly in the middle of a function, and offers allocation primitives suited to running in constant memory on a console. A long running compiler session let developers edit, recompile and upload a function into a running game, which helped with level streaming. Naughty Dog later moved away from Lisp, and a community project called OpenGOAL began in 2020 to port the language to x86-64. Its predecessor was Game Oriented Object Lisp, written for Crash Bandicoot.