[drnick1]

A GC language is a non-starter for a game engine, I thought this was "game development 101" level knowledge. There is a reason every major game engine actually used to make games is written in C++, with some scripting language on top of that for game logic if necessary.

[maccard]

Every game made with Unreal has GC bolted onto it. GC is absolutely viable for shipping games.

[drnick1]

I don't think that's quite true. While Unreal has a GC, it's not used for the low-level components, only for the "user-facing" objects.

[jerf]

Which can rapidly exceed in size and count the "non-user-facing" objects.

This objection really needs to die. GC does not instantly mean you can't program games. At most it locks you out of the tip-of-the-tippy-top AAAA games, but if you were trying for that you weren't going to use "someone's GitHub project" anyhow. And most of them probably have meaningful GC in them anyhow.

[maccard]

What’s your definition of tip of the tippy top AAAA games? Because an awful lot of them are using unreal too!

[maccard]

Pretty much everything in unreal aside from the rendering code and platform interaction layers is written in uobject and actor land - which is garbage collected.

The rendering code also isn’t “just” not garbage collected - it eschews all the normal c++ and is written in a totally different way. It might as well be in a different langauge honestly

[efskap]

Why not respond to the author's justification for it, displayed right on the linked page?

[mvdtnz]

The author calls this out and tries to brush it off with FPS figures,

> The current version of the base engine renders extremely fast, faster than most would think a garbage collected language could go. In my testing a release mode build of a game in Unity with nothing but a black background and a cube runs at about 1,600 FPS.

But straight-up FPS is generally not the main concern with GC in a game engine, it's GC pausing which can make an otherwise smooth game feel almost unplayable. I don't know anything about Go so maybe this is less of a concern in that language?

[bob1029]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.4/Documentation/Manual/perform...

[wredcoll]

Minecraft.

[jedbrooke]

to be fair minecraft Java edition isn’t exactly known for having great performance. It will run on a potato, but still runs like a potato even on fast hardware.

This is also not mentioning that the by far more popular version of the game (by player count) “Minecraft Bedrock edition” is written in C++ precisely for performance reasons on low end mobile hardware

[cxr]

You're moving the goalposts.