Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AussieWog93 1374 days ago
To be fair, video games are different to a lot of other types of software, in the sense that performance is absolutely critical but (certain types of) bugs can often be excused.

One could see why it's more important for a game dev to have a language that forces your mental models to more closely match what the hardware is actually doing, rather than using abstractions that make it less likely that you'll introduce bugs.

2 comments

i am not the guy you replying but i have my 10+ years in the area.

You are voicing something that was true very long time ago. In world where you must be cross play cross platform to cover enough players there is no room for "what the hardware is actually doing". There only few games made by platform holders with exclusivity in mind are still there.

Games that use RAD game tools tend to ship a bunch of platform-specific SIMD code.
So do most games using any middleware. Unreal's math, string and core libraries use platform specific instructions, and do so in a c++ friendly way. That's not a justification for writing a bunch of hyper low level dangerous code to run a raycast!
yep, middleware authors have more time to write SIMD code because they have less moving targets like platform generations. Nobody needs to read that code anyway ^^
Agreed. If I want to write maximally performant code I'll write my own abstractions and use C or very little of C++.

If I want to write fairly performant code quickly I'll reach for C++ and use more of the toolbox.