[zeta0134]

I imagine this is why so many game studios choose to use a mix of the two. C or C++ is used to write the engine code, which is kept just as simple as possible and is in charge of doing all the fiddly bits with the hardware. Unless you're on an embedded system with limited resources though (where the size of your code can actually matter) everything else is usually done in some sort of scripting language with its own reasonably fast JIT. This is possibly sub-optimal, but it enables really fast iteration on the parts of the code that need to change and go through rapid test cycles.

Deciding when to spend the energy and resources to optimize that one routine is the result of good benchmarks and code profiling. Identify your bottlenecks, and optimize the hell out of those. For everything else though, you need to ship a product, and the human effort is largely wasted on a less-called routine that makes the character blink every 173rd frame.

[dmytroi]

Yeah, but there is no "fast JIT" on iOS and PS4 (not sure about X1) at least because they forbid creating memory pages with "Executable" bit, so usually AOT compilation is still ftw in game dev.