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C or C++ for my game engine?

crafn.kapsi.fi

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Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#31

Post by amagumori »

microcolonel wrote: post #10
rootw0rm wrote: post #8

I can sense the pitchforks coming out already! A quick disclaimer first of all: I LOVE C. Love love love it. I'm a reverser so it's my native tongue. I get as much joy from the actual creative process of coding and playing with pointers as I do from having a reliable working finished project. No offense, but I think you suffer from the same problem. You're in love with coding, so being forced to micro-manage things t…

I don't think you're addressing the concerns which made him choose C. In his case: debugging is complex, compilation is slow, name mangling is unreliable, global state is abound. He makes no mention of inline assembler, nor does he encourage premature optimization. He talks instead about a concrete problem he had: the typical performance of operations was not good enough, thus no single optimization would help much.…

meh - imo, even if C++ is a ridiculously bloated beast, it has some things that are indispensable for game programming that C doesn't. vector math without operator overloading is gross. being able to have generic containers with templates is really useful, even if templates are gross. encapsulating functionality in classes is always useful, and you can get a lot of use out of inheritance without overusing it.

these things are really codebase readability and maintainability concerns, and to me they're orthogonal to "data-oriented programming", things like optimizing for cache locality, SoA instead of AoS, not calling virtual methods in warm or hot paths, throwing away malloc and using purpose-built custom allocators, SIMD/AVXify all the things, etc. etc.

it's a lot harder to handle the insane, byzantine complexity of a game engine in something as pared-down as C.

with that said, i don't like C++ and i definitely don't think it's a beautiful language by any means.

jonathan blow's new language, jai, is very interesting. purpose-built for game programming. check it out if you don't know about it yet. it's looking really promising for all types of high-performance, game-like projects.

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#33

Post by Qantourisc »

A lot of games run on Mono/.net Java etc. IIRC these languages have far more overhead. (I could be wrong.) So unless you suspect you need >9000 fps OR you are going to be doing a LOT of processing / complex game you might not need to worry about it ?

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#34

Post by na85 »

dahart wrote: post #13

> 5. realize that I shouldn't be using some parts of C++ (exceptions, stdlib) > 6. start to ponder if I really need even the good parts of C++ This reads like wisdom and maturity to me; unfortunate, but not surprising, that people are quick to judge. Last game studio I worked at, we wouldn't have given up C++, but there were frequent conversations about its pitfalls and complexity, and quite a few rules and conventio…

I don't use C++ for anything serious, can you explain what's wrong with exceptions and the std lib?

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#35

Post by rurban »

I would look at one if those new type and memory safe languages which are more pleasant to work with and usually faster than C/C++, esp. with concurrency. Pony, felix, nim, Julia, Ocaml, elixir, rust.

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#36

Post by cLeEOGPw »

nly wrote: post #24

A 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…

I think one of the main reasons why he did what he did is his motivation, or lack of it while working with C++. Whatever rational arguments would point out to C++ will be essentially meaningless if he is not happy writing with it. That's why discipline is so important in any work. Motivation can get you just so far. It is highly volatile and unreliable. I think it's safe to assume that the author soon will get tired of C and move to languages like python and write an article of how optimizations aren't that important compared to productivity and how critical parts can be written in C, etc. Great article for his perspective and some pros/cons of C/C++, but take it with a grain of salt.

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#37

Post by [deleted] »

fizixer wrote: post #4

> I have to choose between writing duplicated code, writing a code generator, or tedious macro stuff for generic code. Code-generation all the way. Use an expressive language like python/lua/tcl/lisp/scheme to work on a higher layer than C. Two-language programming (one GC scripting, the other C) beats the heck out of C++, in terms of best of both worlds: expressivity in higher layer, performance in lower layer. C++…

[deleted]

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#38

Post by dahart »

na85 wrote: post #34
dahart wrote: post #13

> 5. realize that I shouldn't be using some parts of C++ (exceptions, stdlib) > 6. start to ponder if I really need even the good parts of C++ This reads like wisdom and maturity to me; unfortunate, but not surprising, that people are quick to judge. Last game studio I worked at, we wouldn't have given up C++, but there were frequent conversations about its pitfalls and complexity, and quite a few rules and conventio…

I don't use C++ for anything serious, can you explain what's wrong with exceptions and the std lib?

I wouldn't say "wrong", this is a subjective issue, and some people like them. It's just that exceptions can be dangerous, in a sense, because a very innocuous looking line of code or function call can end up executing something you don't expect, or your function can bail out before you expect. It's similar to how inheritance and virtual functions hide (encapsulate) what's going on, but also obscure execution too. Usually the encapsulation is good, but when you need to know exactly what's going on, they can throw wrenches at you. It can be really hard to figure out all the possible errors that could be thrown, or code paths that could be taken in any given case.

I don't know the specific reasons std lib was mentioned, that's a big topic. But generally in the context of a game engine, you need all custom memory management and I/O, so there isn't much place for std lib, depending on which std lib pieces and which platforms and which C++ you're talking about.

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#39

Post by pjmlp »

anp wrote: post #28
crafn wrote: post #25

Author 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 th…

I think they are marketed exactly well.

If it wasn't for the uptake of UNIX, we probably would never had to discuss about memory corruption in 2016, other than writing stuff like device drivers.

There is now a whole generation that thinks C was the very first systems programming language, the compilers were as good on day 1 as they are today and it has became some kind of sacred cow.

http://www.itsecdb.com/oval/definitions/product-47/0/Linux-L...

Regarding memory corruption and games, it is how we get around to achieve game cheats.

Re: C or C++ for my game engine?

#40

Post by comex »

crafn wrote: post #25

Author 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++)…

FYI, if you care as much about compilation speed as your post suggests, today's Rust is right out: rustc is considerably slower than C++ compilers for typical workloads in large part because it doesn't have proper incremental rebuilds. That could change in a matter of months, which I'm looking forward to, but it still probably won't be at C level.* And without optimizations, rustc produces considerably worse object code than even C++.

* I could be pleasantly surprised, though. In theory, for incremental builds, based on the general design planned [1], rustc should be able to do better even than C in a lot of cases because only changed functions need to be recompiled rather than entire files; but I'm a pessimist and expect there will be something to make it slow in practice. I could be wrong though.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1298-incr...

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