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There's a large faction in AAA games that thinks C++ is a stupid idea. It's debatable who's right in that debate, but good points are being raised. The problem

by groby_b 15y ago

There's a large faction in AAA games that thinks C++ is a stupid idea. It's debatable who's right in that debate, but good points are being raised. The problem is not so much that C++ is a worse language than C - it's that it makes it insanely easy to shoot yourself in the foot in hideously complex ways that take forever to unravel. See e.g. two phase name lookup - http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.html http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.h... There are plenty of other places where the design constraints of C++ have forced it into a dark corner on the edge of the realm of madness. It _does_ buy you additional abstraction, but there is a price you pay for that. Personally, I'm not happy with either camp. C shows its age - it's from the 70s - and C++ is just out of control. So I'll continue to use both unless there's a decent replacement. (I'm squinting at Go, Rust, and BitC - and none of them are quite what I'd like to see)

andolanra 15y ago
I might suggest taking a look at D. It's more or less C++ redesigned from the ground up by a C++ compiler writer, so it's much more consistent and a lot more pleasant to program in. I've had bad experiences with the third-party libraries, which were sometimes inconsistently documented and half-finished on account of the still unfortunately small community, but the standard libraries are excellent, especially everything that Andrei Alexandrescu has touched. For elaboration: http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&siteSectionName= http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&sit...
- Zardoz84 15y ago
  Say that doing metaprogramming in D is really fun and not a guru thing like in C++ .
- groby_b 15y ago
  D _was_ decent until D2.0 started to get a serious case of feature envy. I'm not too happy with that new direction.
zoul 15y ago
It’s a great pity that Objective-C doesn’t get more attention in this regard. It’s C, so it features all the simplicity, elegance and existing APIs. And at the same time it offers a good, simple and flexible object model with almost no surprises. The performance can be very good, too, as proved by the Apple runtime, and you can always drop to lower-level tricks or plain C when you need it. The syntax takes some getting used to, but then turns into another advantage, since it’s very self-descriptive. Again, it’s a shame it gets so little attention outside the Apple world, because it would be a perfect match for many use cases.
- cageface 15y ago
  The problem is that Obj-C message passing is always going to have a cost. STL implementations can inline accessors, for instance, to provide containers and algorithms with essentially zero overhead that can even be faster than raw C because the compiler has more type information.
  - zoul 15y ago
    That’s a non-issue for the vast majority of people. As an example, I have written games in Objective-C for the first iPhones. In a game running at 50 fps you have about 20 ms to get a single frame out, and still I could freely use message passing in the inner game loop without giving it a thought. See also some older measurements by Mike Ash: http://goo.gl/DBTPE http://goo.gl/DBTPE.
    - cageface 15y ago
      An Obj-C message is still about 5x slower than a C++ virtual function call, but even that is too slow for inner loops of expensive algorithms. For example, I'm doing DSP at 44.1k ops per second and I can only afford about one virtual function call for every sixteen samples but I can put my samples in an STL vector with no access overhead vs a raw array. It's true that most people don't need the performance you can get with C++ but if you do it's still really your only serious option.
      - 15y ago

by groby_b 15y ago

andolanra 15y ago

I might suggest taking a look at D. It's more or less C++ redesigned from the ground up by a C++ compiler writer, so it's much more consistent and a lot more pleasant to program in. I've had bad experiences with the third-party libraries, which were sometimes inconsistently documented and half-finished on account of the still unfortunately small community, but the standard libraries are excellent, especially everything that Andrei Alexandrescu has touched. For elaboration: http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&siteSectionName= http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=217801225&sit...

Zardoz84 15y ago
Say that doing metaprogramming in D is really fun and not a guru thing like in C++ .
groby_b 15y ago
D _was_ decent until D2.0 started to get a serious case of feature envy. I'm not too happy with that new direction.

zoul 15y ago

It’s a great pity that Objective-C doesn’t get more attention in this regard. It’s C, so it features all the simplicity, elegance and existing APIs. And at the same time it offers a good, simple and flexible object model with almost no surprises. The performance can be very good, too, as proved by the Apple runtime, and you can always drop to lower-level tricks or plain C when you need it. The syntax takes some getting used to, but then turns into another advantage, since it’s very self-descriptive. Again, it’s a shame it gets so little attention outside the Apple world, because it would be a perfect match for many use cases.

cageface 15y ago
The problem is that Obj-C message passing is always going to have a cost. STL implementations can inline accessors, for instance, to provide containers and algorithms with essentially zero overhead that can even be faster than raw C because the compiler has more type information.
- zoul 15y ago
  That’s a non-issue for the vast majority of people. As an example, I have written games in Objective-C for the first iPhones. In a game running at 50 fps you have about 20 ms to get a single frame out, and still I could freely use message passing in the inner game loop without giving it a thought. See also some older measurements by Mike Ash: http://goo.gl/DBTPE http://goo.gl/DBTPE.
  - cageface 15y ago
    An Obj-C message is still about 5x slower than a C++ virtual function call, but even that is too slow for inner loops of expensive algorithms. For example, I'm doing DSP at 44.1k ops per second and I can only afford about one virtual function call for every sixteen samples but I can put my samples in an STL vector with no access overhead vs a raw array. It's true that most people don't need the performance you can get with C++ but if you do it's still really your only serious option.
    - 15y ago