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by skybrian
3349 days ago
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I wonder if the very low-latency GC in Go would be good enough, though? The occasional dropped frame doesn't seem like the end of the world, so long as it remains rare. In practice, most games don't have entirely reliable performance, particularly on low-end hardware. |
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Drop a frame in a competitive First Person Shooter and be ready for death threats.
Drop a frame in an angry birds clone and be ready for 5 stars in a review just because you made your first game.
I suspect you could could get away with quite a bit of GC in most games. But by the time you learn whether or not you could get away with you have fully committed to language for several months. Unless you fully committed to D you are stuck with your memory management strategy. In order to be risk averse game devs dodge GC languages entirely because the benefit is small compared to the potential gain. Combine this with how everyone wants to make the next super great-<insert genre here> MMO that will blow everyone away, they think that they must squeeze every drop of perf out of the machine and sometimes they are right.
Lua is hugely popular for scripting in games. World of Warcraft used it to script the UI. Its garbage collector can be invoked in steps. You can tell it to get all the garbage or just to get N units of garbage. If you tell it to get 1 unit of garbage each frame while frugally allocating I expect you could easily meet the demands of many casual games.
Then there are games like Kerbal Space Program. All C# and all crazy inconsistent with performance. It will pause for no apparent reason right as you try to extend your lander legs and cause you to wreck your only engine on a faraway planet. I cannot say with certainty it is GC, but that cannot be helping.