T w e n t y S i d e d

There’s a bit of a schism in the world of programming. This divide isn’t over a single issue, but instead over a sort of emerging design philosophy that tends to cluster around particular ideas. It’s complex and multifaceted, and you could spend an entire book exploring all the various differences. In the broad strokes people talk about it in terms of being a debate between people who favor object oriented (OO) programming and people who favor data-oriented (DO) programming, but that’s mostly shorthand for a lot of competing ideas.

A couple of years ago I wrote about object-oriented programming, and the criticisms people have with it. Since then, that discussion has grown louder and more complex. What I’m about to outline is a simplification of this ongoing debate.

Yes, there are other programming styles / philosophies besides these two, but let’s ignore them for now because they’re not really relevant to game development.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 11: The Schism”

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.

I’ve talked about C++ header files before. Like I said earlier in this series, the C language was designed in an age where memory was scarce and it wasn’t feasible for the compiler to hold your entire codebase in memory at once. So projects end up broken up into many different files.

The file marine.c needs to refer to the code in weapons.c, and vehicles.c. Somehow the compiler needs to be aware of the contents of those other files without loading them entirely. So we have a header file, which lists the contents of the other files. It’s like an inventory list. When the compiler is working on marine.c, it loads the header file weapons.h. Then the compiler can say, “Oh, I don’t know what the code for WeaponReload () looks like, but according to the header file I can tell that the code exists. I’ll just keep compiling and trust that the code for WeaponReload () will show up later when I’m compiling some other file.” This way the compiler can know that WeaponReload () exists, and the typo WeaponRelaod () doesn’t, enabling it to catch your error.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 10: Header Files”

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.

In the previous entry I talked about the lack of game-specific types and features in C++, and how this leads to library proliferation, compatibility problems, and a massive duplication of effort. The idea was that a language designed for games ought to contain types that are common to all games. Several people argued in the comments that you shouldn’t add these sorts of things to the language itself, but rather provide them through the standard library.

This leads into a side argument over whether or not we should consider the “standard library” to be part of the language, which is one of those questions like, “Is the bun part of the hot dog?” where everyone thinks the answer is obvious, and are then horrified to discover another group of people who think the opposite answer is the obviously correct one. So then they take turns hitting each other in the face with the dictionary.

Welcome to the internet, I guess.

But since we’re here, I might as well sort this out for people who work in sensible careers rather than becoming programmers.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 9: The Problem With Engines”

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.