3 ms·

Well I would agree if we are talking about very demanding current gen style games (which id software indeed typically produce) but if we look at indie-style gam

Well I would agree if we are talking about very demanding current gen style games (which id software indeed typically produce) but if we look at indie-style games then having garbage collection doesn't preclude a language from being used in games development, or having steady frame rates. There's no technical reason I can think of why Go wouldn't work just as well as C# (XNA/XBLA/MonoTouch/Android) or Java (Minecraft etc) for game development. Garbage Collector sweeps can indeed be a performance problem but there are obvious ways of minimizing it's impact during gameplay. Overall I think (read guess) that unless you are doing some sort of physics simulation, typical game logic requires relatively little cpu power and for the graphics there is hardware acceleration doing the heavy lifting.

Tuna-Fish 13y ago
Go will likely eventually have a GC that will not be that terrible. However, right now it's a simple parallel mark & sweep. If you allocate more than a 1000 objects, and do any allocation during simulation, there will be very noticeable GC pauses. The current Go GC is not anywhere near the capability of C# or Java GC, and would not be suitable for minecraft-level games. > Overall I think (read guess) that unless you are doing some sort of physics simulation, typical game logic requires relatively little cpu power and for the graphics there is hardware acceleration doing the heavy lifting. Well, it of course depends on the game. AAA games spend all the CPU budget allocated to them.
- gillianseed 13y ago
  I realize that it doesn't compare to Java's GC (which is likely state-of-the-art) but is it really terrible? Granted I haven't used Go myself (leaning towards Rust) but I've read that Go is already being employed in production scenarios with good results.
  - Tuna-Fish 13y ago
    It's perfectly passable for web serving and other such high-latency tasks. In a GC, the goals of throughput and latency are diametrically opposed -- optimizing for one makes the other worse. The present simplistic GC is a typical throughput-oriented design.
    - gillianseed 13y ago
      I just remembered these (I knew I'd seen some game examples in Go): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRlY9dFVLg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRlY9dFVLg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMMbf6SRb9Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMMbf6SRb9Q which are game examples as part of a game engine framework written in Go, seems to move smoothly with lots of objects including 2d physics.

Tuna-Fish 13y ago

Go will likely eventually have a GC that will not be that terrible. However, right now it's a simple parallel mark & sweep. If you allocate more than a 1000 objects, and do any allocation during simulation, there will be very noticeable GC pauses. The current Go GC is not anywhere near the capability of C# or Java GC, and would not be suitable for minecraft-level games. > Overall I think (read guess) that unless you are doing some sort of physics simulation, typical game logic requires relatively little cpu power and for the graphics there is hardware acceleration doing the heavy lifting. Well, it of course depends on the game. AAA games spend all the CPU budget allocated to them.

gillianseed 13y ago
I realize that it doesn't compare to Java's GC (which is likely state-of-the-art) but is it really terrible? Granted I haven't used Go myself (leaning towards Rust) but I've read that Go is already being employed in production scenarios with good results.
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  It's perfectly passable for web serving and other such high-latency tasks. In a GC, the goals of throughput and latency are diametrically opposed -- optimizing for one makes the other worse. The present simplistic GC is a typical throughput-oriented design.
  - gillianseed 13y ago
    I just remembered these (I knew I'd seen some game examples in Go): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRlY9dFVLg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRlY9dFVLg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMMbf6SRb9Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMMbf6SRb9Q which are game examples as part of a game engine framework written in Go, seems to move smoothly with lots of objects including 2d physics.