[pjmlp]

C was a bloated language for targeting the Gameboy[0].

Only slowly after the 32bit became mainstream, did professional game developers started adopting C.

In the 8 and 16 bit days, C (and Pascal dialects) were viewed as C# and Java are nowadays for game development.

[0]Using my 80's developer hat.

[ido]

Actually a lot of games are written in c# these days since that's what most unity developers use (and the other options are even less "lean").

I'd say c or c++ is only really standard in the AAA world, most casual/mobile/indie devs use higher level languages & engines (c#/unity, haxe, as3/flash, lua/corona, etc.)

[pjmlp]

I agree, that is why I smile every time I see the discussing of language X being too slow for game development, because of GC, bounds checking or whatever one comes up with.

As I am old enough to have lived through a few programming language generations accused of the same performance issues for game development, C included.

[crazypyro]

To be fair, currently most of those tools involve low level linking to C code for performance-critical computations, no?

[pjmlp]

Actually C++, as most studios have moved away from pure C around the PS2 timeframe.

But the reason it is not always performance. Sometimes it is reusing already existing, battlefield tested proven code.

However, I can rephrase your question by replacing C with inline Assembly and we are back to the discussions I was having around 25 years ago.

[ekianjo]

Werent most Amiga and Atari ST games written in C though?

[pjmlp]

Surely not.

You need to do a lot of low level programming to target the custom sound and graphics chips those machines had available.

Not to mention that with 512 KB, every byte counted.

I cannot speak much for the Atari ST, as I was on the Amiga side of the bench.

The operating system was originally coded in Assembly and BCPL, with later versions having some C code as well(mostly K&R still).

Assembly and special game programming languages like AMOS, were the main programming languages for game developers on Amiga.

C was just another business programming language like C#, Java, Ruby and many others are today.

Mostly used for standard desktop software, or for doing the UNIX university projects at home.

Young developers take C's ubiquity for granted nowadays, but there was a time, when it was just yet another programming language.

[zedr]

> it was just yet another programming language.

It was considered a high-level programming language.

[pjmlp]

I have a few 80's books that refer to C as middle-level programming language.

High-level was already reserved for the likes of Lisp and Smalltalk.