Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

C or C++ for my game engine?

crafn.kapsi.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 125 posts

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

#51

Post by golergka »

You speak about perfomance a lot, but do you actually have it as an important requirement, or is it just fun problem to tackle as programmer? In modern game development, it's usually the latter — most hobby game projects don't have art assets detailed enough to be slow on platforms where your end-users actually will play your game.

I make games in Unity/C#, and yes, of course it's slower than a custom C solution. But instead of spending time on writing my own containers and memory allocation, I spend time writing game logic. Instead of optimizing game to run from 100 to 150 FPS on my computer, I'd rather spend this productive time making 5 variants of the same game mechanic to find out which is more fun. Even if the game runs in just 30 FPS.

Of course, I sometimes try to research low-level stuff, write my own renderer, or do a small experimental project in pure C, but then my goal is to research, not to write a game. I can hardly imagine a project, where the goal would be to develop a game, and not to research, where using C and having to spend so much time on this matters would be a good trade-off compared to working on actual game mechanics in higher-level language.

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

#52

Post by jarcane »

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…

Yes. For me, as someone who came to Rust from a non-C/++ background, the appeal of Rust to me is that I get powerful features like an ML-ish type system, iterators, functional programming toys, and more, while still getting C++ or even C-sized performant executables.

Rust to me feels like someone sat down to make a systems language that was actually aware of the last 40 years of programming language development. I don't have to sacrifice expressiveness for performance anymore.

The borrowing and reference safety mechanics are just an extra layer of worry-removal icing on what's already a pretty appealing cake.

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

#53

Post by jbb555 »

Excellent article. I'm not sure I agree with all the points, but none of them are stupid or necessarily wrong. It's a very constructive argument.

I've been thinking for a while that the problem with C++ is that 100 decisions have been made both in the library & language and in "best practice" that all individually are good, but the combined effect has been unfortunate.

I'm not quite getting from the article why you can't write in the C "subset" of C++ and add in a few of the more helpful parts of C++ though.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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++)…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by jbb555 »

Are there any other sources of information on "modern C"? I'm thinking particualrly on how to handle memory allocations well and safely, and how to write clean containers and algorithms. It's been a long time since I wrote pure C and I'd like to try it again!

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

#56

Post by iainmerrick »

gaze wrote: post #21
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

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.

That's a nice soundbite, but not really fair.

Modern Smalltalk-style languages can be fast. Look at Javascript! And in Obj-C, you can drop down to plain C when you need the speed.

It's possible to get your types mixed up when using non-generic collections, and that will throw an exception at runtime. No different from Go or Python.

In terms of memory safety, it's a step up from C if you use ARC, as all your object lifetimes are managed automatically. You can still get memory corruption if you're careless with arrays, but it's not really an issue with objects.

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

#57

Post by mikekchar »

unscaled wrote: post #45
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++)…

I was positively surprised by the constructiveness of the article itself. You'd usually get Linus' style rant about how C++ sucks so bad and C is the epitome of simplicity and design. I wholeheartedly agree with you that both languages are lacking, and I'm also waiting until Rust or another language grows mature enough to replace both of them in most cases. But I think most of the main points you describe as impossib…

I agree with your depiction of C++. In fact, one of the benefits of C++ is that it is convenient to use stack allocation rather than heap allocation. This can really simplify memory management. The trick is that you have to choose a different idiom for your idiomatic C++ ;-). The trick is to always know who owns the memory and to never allocate memory in libraries. You use dependency injection, always pass by reference and always clean up in your destructors. If you are forced to allocate something in a library, you build a wrapper to deallocate it (or sometimes copy it when you receive the memory so that you can own it).

It takes some experience to build applications this way, but it is well worth building that experience. C++ is still my language of choice for anything that requires fine control of memory and attention to performance. Rust looks like a very possible successor, but I agree that the lack of incremental compiling makes it not useful for large projects at the moment.

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

#58

Post by munchbunny »

Rusky wrote: post #12
nine_k wrote: post #9

I'd hazard to offer Rust :) Someone has to.

The author does mention Rust: > New and hip GC'd languages don't care about the priorities efficient game engine code has. 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. However, I disagree with this. Rust does enforce safety, but once you have a feel for how the borrow checker works (which isn't ha…

The library thing is huge. If you're in C++ land you've got UE4 and a large number of open source graphics engines (Ogre3D), plus far more options in every category of engine (OpenAL, Box2D, and so on). If you're in .NET/Mono land you've got Unity and a plethora of engines built around Unity.

It's ridiculous how much work these engines will save you, once you know how to use them, but ecosystem is key because these engines are HUGE.

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

#59

Post by gone35 »

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++…

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

Tried to visit that site, but all I get is this message:

"Sorry, your browser is not fully supported.

There may be some issues with pages layout in your current browser. Please use an alternate browser until we resolve the issues. Thank you."

Since when is it OK to just refuse to serve a page if it's not 'the right' browser? Is this a thing now?

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

#60

Post by greyman »

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…

As a long-time C++ coder, I need to add that project-specific prohibition of some C++ practices is a pretty normal, even recommended thing to do. Introducing such prohibitions is not a fault of C++.

Also, I observed that "bad experience with C++" is often related to someone using, while not completely understood, some more advanced C++ paradigm.

Post reply on HN