C++ is the main language of game development. This is changing slowly as indies embrace other languages, but in the AAA space C++ is still overwhelmingly dominant. C++ is descended from – and is very similar to – the language C. First created in 1972, C is just one year younger than I am. It was devised for the world of the 1970s. It was targeted at the hardware of the 1970s, and was originally intended for writing operating systems.
This seems crazy, doesn’t it? Writing operating systems for Nixon-era mainframes is so vastly different from building AAA games in 2019 that it’s like we’re using coal-fired steam engines to go to the moon. Sure, the steam engine has been modernized a bit, but there are still conventions built into the language that don’t make a lot of sense in the world of 2019. The fact remains that somewhere underneath all those rocket engines and silver wings is a chugging steam engine.
C++ certainly has language features not available in C. C++ has classes, inheritance, operator overloading, and a bunch of other slick ways of expressing complex solutions in code. Those are nice, but none of those things uniquely address challenges faced in games programming. We could, in an alternate universe, use a different sort of language with a different set of features.
It’s not like this industry is incapable of evolution! Studios have changed game engines, and game engines have changed what graphics API they favorOn the PC side, this boils down to DirectX vs. OpenGL, with third-party candidate Vulkan landing a few recent wins.. Our tools are different, the target hardware is different, the operating systems are different, and the performance challenges have changed numerous times. Rendering technology has gone through at least two major revolutions. First there was the jump from software rendering to using dedicated graphics hardware, and then another jump when we added the ability to program that graphics hardware using shaders. Over the last 30 years we’ve changed every single thing about game development except the language!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Programming Vexations Part 3: The Dominance of C++”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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