[pjmlp]

Only as urban myth scattered around by the C crowd.

As user from all Borland product until they changed to Inprise, it was definitely not the case. Pascal and Basic compilers provided enough customization points.

When one of them wasn't fast enough versus Assembly, none of them were.

I used to have fun showing C dudes in demoscene parties how to optimize code.

Now, if you are speaking about the dying days of MS-DOS, when everyone was jumping into 32 bit extenders with Watcom C++, then we are already in another chapter of 16 bit compiler history.

[beagle3]

I used TP from 3.0 to 7.0 and a little bit of Delphi 1, and contemporary Turbo C; I dropped to assembly often, dropped TP bound checking often, and was well aware of all these controls.

Parsing with a *ptr++ in TC was not matched by TP until IIRC v7; 16 bit watcom often produced way better code than either TP or TC.

And, as you say, indeed when speed was really needed, you dropped to assembly; no compiler at the time would properly generate “lodsb” inside a loop, although watcom did in its late win3 target days IIRC.

[pjmlp]

I cannot say I ever bother to benchmark parsing algorithms across languages in MS-DOS, so maybe that was a case where Turbo C might have won a couple of micro-benchmarks.

[beagle3]

That was just an example. In general, properly written TP code (properly configured) was on par with properly written TC code, and both were slower than properly written Watcom code in my experience - I did them all and switched frequently.

Parsing was one example where C shone above Pascal, and there were others. My experience was Watcom was consistently better, but in general C was sometimes easier/faster, Pascal was rarely easier/faster, and if speed mattered ASM was the only way.

[pjmlp]

Well, as I mentioned in several comments, in what concerns my part of the world, in a time and age where a BBS was the best we could get for going online, Watcom did not even exist on my radar until MS-DOS 32bit extenders were relevant.

So we are forgetting here the complete 8 bit generation, and 3/4 of MS-DOS lifetime.

[BubRoss]

This doesn't line up with the reality that almost all games were written in combinations of C and asm.

[pjmlp]

During 8 bit days, all games that mattered were written in Assembly.

During the 16 bit days, Pascal, Basic, C, Modula-2, AMOS were the "Unity" of early 90's game developers, with serious games still being written in Assembly.

The switch to C occurred much later at the end of MS-DOS lifetime, when 386 and 486 were widespread enough, thanks success like Doom and Abrash books.

Easy to check from pouet, hugi, breakout, Assembly or GDC postmortem archives.

[BubRoss]

The person you replied to said that C was the language of choice for speed and not rivaled by pascal or basic. What games were written in pascal or basic and known to be competitive with other high end games of the time?

[pjmlp]

This kind of speed?

"Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."

-- Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Back to your games list,

Most strategy games from SSI used compiled Basic and Pascal based engines. Only at the very end did they switch to C / C++.

Apogee has written several games in Turbo Pascal.

The games released by Oliver Twins on the BBC Micro, using a mix of Basic and Assembly. Which then eventually found Blitz Games Studios.

If one considers OS having the same performance requirements as games, Apple's Lisa and Mac OSes, written in a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly.

Also related to games, Adobe Photoshop was initially written in Pascal before going cross platform.

EDIT: Forgot to add some demos as well,

Demos from Denthor, tpolm.

Anything from Triton and first games from their Starbreeze studio.

[MaxBarraclough]

> C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.

How is C to blame for universities not teaching compilers?

[BubRoss]

You didn't list any actual game titles, just game makers.

Also quoting someone saying that C destroyed the ability to make compiler optimizations is a little strange when that has been at the core of most software for decades. It's bizarre how much you try to argue about things with mountains of evidence to the contrary.

[beagle3]

While I don't necessarily agree with his claims, it is true that there's a huge gap of about 10-15 years between when FORTRAN compilers did some optimizations and when C compilers were able to do them (and only if you properly annotated things with __restrict, etc). I used FORTRAN77 compilers in the early 1990s that did vectorization / pipelining of the kind C compilers started doing in the last decade.

The main reason, though, is that in FORTRAN, the aliasing rules allow the compiler to assume basically anything, whereas C has sequence points and a (super weak) memory model which don't. But I wouldn't say it is C's fault.

[pjmlp]

Apparently going into the history of the games produced by those game makers is asking too much.

That someone has done more for improving the computing world than either of us ever will.

See that is is the thing with online forums, I tell my point of view and personal lifetime experience, someone like you will dismiss it, then I reply, you dimiss it again as not fitting your view of the world, ask for yet another set of whatever stuff, and I will just watch Netflix for what I care, as I have better things to do with my life than win online discussions.