Has anyone attempted using Objective-C for game development outside of iOS gaming? It'd be interesting using it as an OO language substitute for C++.
No. It has the speed of smalltalk and the type safety of C.
C or C++ for my game engine?
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#22Has anyone attempted using Objective-C for game development outside of iOS gaming? It'd be interesting using it as an OO language substitute for C++.
There isn't much reason to. Without the Apple libraries and XCode support Objective-C isn't anything special.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#23Has anyone attempted using Objective-C for game development outside of iOS gaming? It'd be interesting using it as an OO language substitute for C++.
There isn't much reason to. Without the Apple libraries and XCode support Objective-C isn't anything special.
Well, I do know non-iOS devs whose dislike of C++ have caused them to speak in favor of ObjC, but I suppose they would simply use C with structs in that case.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#24A good article, but what disturbs me is that the author, while obviously aware of relatively good C++ and programming practices, has somehow arrived in a place where he discounts essentially all of C++s core competencies... like claiming RAII is "far from optimal", that exception safety is "a constant mental overhead", and that copy and move semantics involve writing "a lot of code". These are fairly outrageous claims, and it all smells of total burnout, and losing sight of the forest for the trees, to me.
I feel if the author refocused on his C++ basics instead of bemoaning lots of peripheral crap (like OOP, and the unsuitability of the STL for game dev) he'd reconsider some joy in C++ again.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#25Author here. I'm positively surprised, constructive discussion on internet!
There's been some discussion about using Rust.
Rust is an interesting language, and has definitely potential substituting C and C++ in some domains. The main reason I'm not so interested in using it is for game development, is because it's more complicated than C (like C++), and the complications are a bit off from what I'd want (like in C++). Just a quick googling reveals that rust mangles names by default, and doesn't have reflection, so I'd probably be in for a lot of negative surprises. Add that with being indifferent about the absolute security, and soon my code is mostly inside unsafe blocks so that I don't have to spend time convincing the compiler my pointers are safe. Maybe. I haven't done much programming in Rust. There are some nice convenience features though, when comparing to C, but they seem to be rather minor things.
It comes down to choosing between two non-ideal solutions. I value simplicity more than some, so favoring the simpler one feels more natural to me. Sure, when you need the safety then Rust seems like a decent choice.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#26Why not Rust for example? If I'd be making an engine, I'd tried that.
"Safety-enforcing languages like Rust are going somewhat off already by definition, as they're focusing primarily on safety, which is not the focus for most game code."
I don't really agree with this assessment (I think rust's "safety guarantees" really amount to amazing compile time programmer assistance), but that's their stated reason.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#27I can't help but think the author would benefit from some of the philosophy of James Hague (a game programmer): http://prog21.dadgum.com/ Don't focus too much on technology, disconnected from what people (including you) might want to actually use. Otherwise you will not get the real inspirations -- even purely technical inspirations -- that come from something that you intend to use.
I get where that comes from. I surely did have the disconnection some years back, but think I'm on a better track now. Thanks for the link.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#28Author here. I'm positively surprised, constructive discussion on internet! There's been some discussion about using Rust. Rust is an interesting language, and has definitely potential substituting C and C++ in some domains. The main reason I'm not so interested in using it is for game development, is because it's more complicated than C (like C++), and the complications are a bit off from what I'd want (like in C++)…
Only responding to one element of your comment -- but I think that Rust's safety features are over-marketed in my experience. The safety Rust offers is only part of a package that provides high-performance high-level abstractions over functionality that is normally very bit-twiddly in C. So far, my favorite thing about Rust is not its safety, but how easy it is to write good performance software using abstractions that are as convenient as Python (or another high-level language). The safety is just icing on the cake at that point (for me at least).
EDIT: Re: pointers -- Rust is a lot easier to write if you just ignore pointers. Really. Either pass small structs by value or pass references (either immutable or mutable), and let the compiler handle the actual pointer manipulation.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#29A good article, but what disturbs me is that the author, while obviously aware of relatively good C++ and programming practices, has somehow arrived in a place where he discounts essentially all of C++s core competencies... like claiming RAII is "far from optimal", that exception safety is "a constant mental overhead", and that copy and move semantics involve writing "a lot of code". These are fairly outrageous claim…
>These are fairly outrageous claims, and it all smells of total burnout, and losing sight of the forest for the trees, to me.
Maybe, I don't know. I have been a lot happier with C though, while still writing some C++ code during the year.
Re: C or C++ for my game engine?
#30I agree wholeheartedly with most of this post, but ended up coming to a different conclusion to the author. I don't trust myself to write good, maintable and safe C, so instead my semi-toy game engine has been (and is being) authored in Nim instead, which I've found quite interesting. Writing safe wrappers over C-libraries is a challenge in and of itself!
Isn't Nim (and almost all of its standard library) garbage collected by default? I've been very intrigued by Nim but it seems that while it has nice native/C code generation, it opts into my least favorite element of "high-level" languages.