[vvanders]

I think you may be indexing a bit into your exposure and painting the industry in a broad brush.

I've seen impressive things done with Lua, from literate AI programming with coroutines to building compostable component based language constructs instead of standard OOP. You have things like GOAL[1] which ran on crazy small systems (the Lua I saw ran in a 400kb block as well).

On performance, data oriented design and efficient use of caches is the way you get faster. I've done it in Java, I've done it in C#, I've done it in Rust and C++. Certain languages have better primitives for data layout and so you see gamedev index into them. We used to do things like "in-place seek-free" loading where an object was directly serialized to disk and pointers were written as offsets that were fixed up post load. Techniques like this easily net 10-30x performance benefits. It's the same reason database engines run circles around standard language constructs.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

[WorldMaker]

You are correct that I am using a broad brush, but so far it is a broad brush sort of conversation. I realize I'm a (bitter?) cynic at this point and don't have a lot of respect for the videogames industry as a whole from a technical perspective, because it is an industry that prides itself on reinventing wheels, not sharing a lot of efforts between projects, and not trusting nor retaining expertise in the long run. I realize there are a lot of great and novel approaches such as the ones you mention (I appreciate that), but so much of the novelty is siloed and a lot of what I see as a certain kind of outsider is the tiniest slices of things that escaped the siloes such as Unity and Unreal. I realize they aren't accurate to the state of the technical art in some siloes, but these days given the number of games using one or the other of those two common engines today it certainly reflects the "state of the technical median".