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by pjmlp 2337 days ago
Just like doing virtual calls or using OS memory allocator used to be shunned by early C++ adopters on the game industry.

I still remember when doing games in Basic/Pascal/C was considered to be like Unity nowadays, real games had to be written in Assembly.

As you say, every game and its requirements are different, and many 8/16 bit games were perfectly doable in C, Pascal, Basic and eventually the community moved along, just like it happened with C vs C++ a couple of years later.

I see the use of GC enabled languages the same way, and C# belongs to those languages that also offer other means of memory allocation, not everything needs to live on the GC heap.

1 comments

I think you’re absolutely right here. The reason people often dismiss garbage collection in game programming is the pauses, but if the pauses aren’t noticeable then the reason to dismiss goes away. Computer performance gains over time can totally help dismiss that, much akin to virtual calls or default allocators. The writing on the wall was there after games like Minecraft became a huge hit.