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Java is incredibly productive - it's fast and has the best tooling out there IMO. Unfortunately it's not a good gaming language. GC pauses aren't really accept

Java is incredibly productive - it's fast and has the best tooling out there IMO. Unfortunately it's not a good gaming language. GC pauses aren't really acceptable (which C# also suffers from) and GPU support is limited. Miguel de Icaza probably has more experience than anyone building game engines on GC platforms and is very vocally moving toward reference counted languages [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo

nayuki 1y ago
> GC pauses aren't really acceptable Java has made great progress with low-pause (~1 ms) garbage collectors like ZGC and Shenandoah since ~5 years ago.
- BigJono 1y ago
  People have 240hz monitors these days, you have a bit over 4ms to render a frame. If that 1ms can be eliminated or amortised over a few frames it's still a big deal, and that's assuming 1ms is the worst case scenario and not the best.
  - palata 1y ago
    What about the C# garbage collector? Is it much better? Because Unity is in C#, right?
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Unity uses aginging Mono runtime, because of politics with Xamarin, before its acquisition by Microsoft, migration to .NET Core is still in process. Additionally they have HPC#, which is a C# subset for high performance code, used by the DOTS subsystem. Many people mistake their C# experience in Unity, with what the state of the art in .NET world is. Read the great deep dive blog posts from Stephen Toub on Microsoft DevBlogs on each .NET Core release since version 5.0.
  - vips7L 1y ago
    I don’t think you need to work in absolutes here. There are plenty of games that do not need to render at 240hz and are capable of handling pauses up to 1ms. There’s tons of games that are currently written in languages that have larger GC pauses than that.
- willtemperley 1y ago
  Yes and it's impressive. For the competitive Minecraft player, I suspect starting their VM with XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions is normal. A casual gamer is however not going to enjoy that.
  - nayuki 1y ago
    Are you sure that enabling ZGC or Shenandoah requires UnlockExperimentalVMOptions ?
    - willtemperley 1y ago
      Let's get back to the point. Is Java a good gaming language?
pjmlp 1y ago
He would vouch as great as he might be, he has a bias, and Mono GC was never a great implementation. Also here is how great his new Swift love performs in reality against modern tracing GCs, https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages
- willtemperley 1y ago
  Interesting link, but that's a nearly 7 year old version of Swift (4.2) running on Linux. I wonder how the performance would be with Swift 6.1 which has improved support for Linux.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Probably much better, given the improvements on the Swift optimizer, but just goes to show "tracing GC" bad, "reference counting GC" good isn't as straighforward as people make it to be, even if they are renowned developers.
    - willtemperley 1y ago
      It's a cherry picked, out-of-date counter-example. Swift isn't designed for building drivers. In reality, a lot of Swift apps are delegating to C code. My own app (in development) does a lot of processing, almost none of which happens in Swift, despite the fact I spend the vast majority of my time writing Swift. Swift an excellent C glue language, which Java isn't. This is why Swift will probably become an excellent game language eventually.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        It surely is, according to Apple's own documentation. > Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics. -- https://developer.apple.com/swift/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/ If developers have such a big problem glueing C libraries into Java JNI, or Panama, then maybe game industry is not where they are supposed to be, when even Assembly comes to play.

nayuki 1y ago

> GC pauses aren't really acceptable Java has made great progress with low-pause (~1 ms) garbage collectors like ZGC and Shenandoah since ~5 years ago.

BigJono 1y ago
People have 240hz monitors these days, you have a bit over 4ms to render a frame. If that 1ms can be eliminated or amortised over a few frames it's still a big deal, and that's assuming 1ms is the worst case scenario and not the best.
- palata 1y ago
  What about the C# garbage collector? Is it much better? Because Unity is in C#, right?
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Unity uses aginging Mono runtime, because of politics with Xamarin, before its acquisition by Microsoft, migration to .NET Core is still in process. Additionally they have HPC#, which is a C# subset for high performance code, used by the DOTS subsystem. Many people mistake their C# experience in Unity, with what the state of the art in .NET world is. Read the great deep dive blog posts from Stephen Toub on Microsoft DevBlogs on each .NET Core release since version 5.0.
- vips7L 1y ago
  I don’t think you need to work in absolutes here. There are plenty of games that do not need to render at 240hz and are capable of handling pauses up to 1ms. There’s tons of games that are currently written in languages that have larger GC pauses than that.
willtemperley 1y ago
Yes and it's impressive. For the competitive Minecraft player, I suspect starting their VM with XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions is normal. A casual gamer is however not going to enjoy that.
- nayuki 1y ago
  Are you sure that enabling ZGC or Shenandoah requires UnlockExperimentalVMOptions ?
  - willtemperley 1y ago
    Let's get back to the point. Is Java a good gaming language?

pjmlp 1y ago

He would vouch as great as he might be, he has a bias, and Mono GC was never a great implementation. Also here is how great his new Swift love performs in reality against modern tracing GCs, https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

willtemperley 1y ago
Interesting link, but that's a nearly 7 year old version of Swift (4.2) running on Linux. I wonder how the performance would be with Swift 6.1 which has improved support for Linux.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Probably much better, given the improvements on the Swift optimizer, but just goes to show "tracing GC" bad, "reference counting GC" good isn't as straighforward as people make it to be, even if they are renowned developers.
  - willtemperley 1y ago
    It's a cherry picked, out-of-date counter-example. Swift isn't designed for building drivers. In reality, a lot of Swift apps are delegating to C code. My own app (in development) does a lot of processing, almost none of which happens in Swift, despite the fact I spend the vast majority of my time writing Swift. Swift an excellent C glue language, which Java isn't. This is why Swift will probably become an excellent game language eventually.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      It surely is, according to Apple's own documentation. > Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics. -- https://developer.apple.com/swift/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/ If developers have such a big problem glueing C libraries into Java JNI, or Panama, then maybe game industry is not where they are supposed to be, when even Assembly comes to play.