| > But when you want to hire developers in the industry and take advantage of the existing C#/C++ knowledge, then using either of those and building the whole engine/documentation around them is probably the better choice. Programming in C++ is well supported though. This is the main reason I personally would not use C# in Godot much. It is really good general purpose language that will do fine in almost any situation but it will not excel as much on performance critical stuff like C++ does but also does not have the ease of use for quick scripting like GDScript. I guess it is a matter of the philosophies. Some people really like to use just a single language and then C# is a excellent choice while I think having languages optimized for certain strengths might be a good idea. So for me it is GDScript + C++/Rust/Nim if need be (the later ones also providing some safety on top of performance). Plus the vast majority of hobbyist devs will never run into any limitation with GDScript to begin with. > That said, GDScript absolutely does not have a large ecosystem around general purpose computing tasks. You have the whole C/C++ ecosystem of libraries that you can use if need be. Maybe not from GDScript directly but from a GDExtension language binding of your choice. If you are at the point that you can even dare to think about complex multiplayer games, you are a professional and can be safely expected to know how to use C/C++ libraries, mostly. Though the ecosystem C# brings additionally to the table is also very nice to have, that much I admit. > That said, you can hire C# developers and C# game developers Can you, though? Writing a CRUD app in C# is quiete different to writing C# in Unity which is different to C# in Godot. Maybe I am biased because I enjoy learning programming language but I am genuinely confused about the practice of hiring for specific languages. Maybe there are some developers that refuse to learn anything new, having been much on the other side. Learning a new language takes days or worst case a week, learning libraries, best practices, switching towards a whole new area like game dev vs backend dev, that takes lots and lots of time. You can't really take a Unity dev and have them be productive in Godot from day one, they still need to learn how the engine works, how it expects them to structure their code and so on. Anyone that has worked with a scripting language before can learn GDScript in a few hours, that is not a blocker at all. Wrapping you head around nodes and all on the other hand takes some time. I think hiring for general game dev experience works out much better, as the concepts translate through languages and specific engines. > Either way, here's hoping that Godot will have a bright future ahead of it, currently still considering using it over Unity due to its open nature, albeit primarily using C# with engine agnostic code libraries. I do hope that C# support doesn't fizzle out, because personally I find it to be a pretty great language with a nice ecosystem around it. I think they are quiete committed to it at this point. There is obviously vast outside interest in it from all the people coming from Unity. Plus Microsoft has obviously an interest to keep C# in Godot and so will probably keep the money flowing. That said Godot is not ready for complex 3d games yet with or without C#. It is still far away from Unity. Godot 4 did make big steps but I would expect that will take at least until 4.1 for it to be ready for bigger professional projects. For 2d though it might be best in class and superior to Unity. |
This is an excellent point, though it also brings the complexity of C++ as a language to light as well. That's why many use Blueprints in Unreal Engine, just so they wouldn't deal with a powerful language like C++ that has lots of footguns, despite its libraries, interop and other capabilities. So much so, that they tried getting C# support into the engine (as well as a few others over the years).
In a sense, it's a spectrum, with something like C++ on one end, C# somewhere in the middle (reasonably performant and capable, but also with relatively few footguns) and GDScript on the other end, even though the library support isn't as good as, say, Python. Hence, if you need bunches of fancy functionality, you'll probably need to choose between either C++ or C#, not having access to the latter complicating things.
> Can you, though? Writing a CRUD app in C# is quite different to writing C# in Unity which is different to C# in Godot.
The concerns are a bit different, especially when you're racing against the render loop, but I'd argue that it's not all that dissimilar, be it in regards to C# in specific engines or different types of applications.
Personally, with a few key differences in mind, there isn't that much difference between developing local CRUD apps, doing web development, or even game development - those key differences in the case of game development being more focus on linear algebra and performance, and utilizing other abstractions (for example the whole scene graph concept and traversing it, which honestly is not that dissimilar from something like Pinia stores, which might be an interesting comparison).
Between different engines, you have the whole component system of Unity, which I think is a better fit for my personal headspace, but then again having everything be nodes in Godot is also great, especially since dealing with prefabs is no longer quite as awkward, even though you cannot attach multiple scripts to a single node, which is inconvenient.
In comparison, writing any kind of piece of software in Rust would be a wildly different experience from doing the same in C#, due to how different the language concepts (e.g. borrow checker) are. Similarly, I'd personally say the same about C++ and C# (the whole approach to memory management, even with smart pointers) and C# and GDScript (the gradual typing in particular).
> Learning a new language takes days or worst case a week, learning libraries, best practices, switching towards a whole new area like game dev vs backend dev, that takes lots and lots of time.
I'd suggest that learning a new language can take anywhere from a few months to close to multiple years, depending on the language and what you intend to do in it, especially when coupled with particular stacks/frameworks/engines. Just look at how much C++ software there is out there and how much of it is full of memory management related bugs. Sure, you might knock something together after a weekend with a book or two, but getting to truly know the ins and outs of a language, as well as some of the more popular design patterns (at least in the context of that language) will probably take way more than a week.
I do fully agree with your points about different engines having plenty of specifics, but would like to offer the suggestion that transferring from C# in Unity to C# in Godot will be a comparatively easy process, versus learning GDScript and not being able to use any of your in house non game engine specific libraries for development. Something like maths for splines, some back end logic for handling inventories, levelling up, dialogue trees, quest systems etc. Of course, in practice many end up being tied to a particular engine because nobody cares about portability - much like ORMs in practice rarely allow for painfree migration across different DBs.
> That said Godot is not ready for complex 3d games yet with or without C#.
With this, I can agree. It's nice to think about the future of the game engine, though. Somehow Godot seems to have gotten way more traction than the likes of Stride (which was great), NeoAxis, or even something like jMonkeyEngine. Not sure what their magic sauce was, but I hope they have a bright future ahead of them.