[fny]

I never understood how people use compiled languages for video games let alone simple GUIs. Even though I'm now competent in a few, and I have LLMs at my disposal, I fall back to electron or React Native just because it's such a pain in the ass to iterate with anything static.

Native devs: what are your go to quality of live improvements?

[danielheath]

Having a visual builder tool in an IDE like Delphi or Visual Basic or any of the others.

They ship with an existing library of components, you drag and drop them onto a blank canvas, move them around, live preview how they’ll change at different screen sizes, etc… then switch to the code to wire up all the event handlers etc.

All the iteration on design happens before you start compiling, let alone running.

[ellg]

what does compilation have to do with iteration speed? There's a lot of ways to get a similar feedback loop that youd get in something like react, like separating out your core gameplay loop into its own compilation unit / dll and reloading it on any changes inside your application

[jpablo]

Yeah... that's way, way, way more complex than npm run dev

[poly2it]

NPM is absurdly complex in comparison, it's just neatly abstracted. Maybe somebody will write a cross-platform reactive layer which can compile both natively and to the web?

[ellg]

if i wrap a bunch of abstractions in a `make run` command whats the difference

[zdragnar]

Hot reloading is about the only difference if you're doing incremental builds.

For that, some languages are blocked by runtimes that don't support it. C can do it [0] so it's not a limitation of the static/dynamic divide.

[0] https://www.slembcke.net/blog/HotLoadC/

[socalgal2]

Video games generally have various editors and that is where the major iteration happens. It's not like HTML where you type some tags and refresh. Instead you have/make editors to design your levels, UIs, characters.

Most video game teams are < 30% programmers.

[MaulingMonkey]

> video games

Often use dynamic/scripting languages to improve iteration on gameplay code, even if a lot of the fundamental underlying code is native. And add dev-time hot reloading wherever we can so when you change a texture, it reloads ≈immediately without needing to so much as restart the level. We exile as much as we can to tables and other structured data formats which can easily be tweaked and verified by non-coders so we're not a bottleneck for the game designers and artists who want to tweak things, and make that stuff hot-reloadable if possible as well.

We also often have in-house build server farms full of testing code, because it's such a pain in the ass to iterate with anything dynamic. After all, games are huge, and sufficient testing to make sure all your uncompiled unanalyzed typecheckless code works is basically impossible - things are constantly breaking as committed during active development, and a decent amount of engineering work is frequently dedicated to such simple tasks as triaging , collecting, and assigning bugs and crash reports such that whomever broke it knows they need to fix it, as well as allowing devs and designers to work from previous "known good" commits and builds so they aren't blocked/unable to work on their work - which means internal QA helping identify what's actually "known good", hosting and distributing multiple build versions internally such that people don't have to rebuild the universe themselves (because that's several hours of build time), etc.

Some crazy people invest in hot-reloadable native code. There's all kinds of limits on what kinds of changes you can make in such a scenario, but it's entirely possible to build a toolchain where you save a .cpp file, and your build tooling automatically kicks off a rebuild of the affected module(s), triggering a hot reload of the appropriate .dll, causing your new behavior to be picked up without restarting your game process. Which probably means it'll immediately crash due to a null pointer dereference or somesuch because some new initialization code was never triggered by the hot reloading, but hey, at least it theoretically works!

And, of course, nothing is stopping you from creating isolated sandboxes/examples/test cases where you skip all the menuing, compiling unrelated modules, etc. and iterating in that faster context instead of the cumbersome monolith for most of your work.

[chuckadams]

Having a faster build step helps: I just stepped back into C recently, and I don't even want to imagine doing it without ccache and meson.

[brcmthrowaway]

Why not ninja?

[chuckadams]

Meson uses ninja under the hood.

[Arbortheus]

Not game dev related, but I program in both Go and Python, and there really is no difference in my feedback loop / iteration because Go builds are so fast and cache unchanged parts.

[colejhudson]

re, iteration: Have you encountered ImGui [0]? It's basically standard when prototyping any sort of graphical application.

re, GUIs in statically typed languages: As you might expect, folks typically use a library. See Unreal Engine, raylib, godot, qt, etc. Sans that, any sort of 2D graphics library can get the job done with a little work.

You might also take a look at SwiftUI if you have an Apple device.

[0]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It's basically standard when prototyping any sort of graphical application.

while imgui is super-cool, this is wildly overstating its reach or significance. It also embodies a very particular style of GUI programming (so-called "immediate mode", hence the "Im" part of the name) that is very well suited to some sorts of GUI applications and less so for others. The other style, often called "deferred mode", is the one used by most native toolkits, and it is very far from trivial to just switch an application between the two.

So, while there are plenty of good reasons to consider imgui for a graphical application, there are also many reasons why you would not want to use it too. It is very far from "standard" in terms of prototyping such apps.