T w e n t y S i d e d

We finally get to the good stuff. The discussion below contains a lot of the reasons I wanted to do this write-up in the first place.

1:00:00 Let’s Make an Array Type.

Yeeeessss.

This might seem trivial to a lot of people. This is basically just a fix for the std::vector<int> name; problem I discussed earlier in this series. We use arrays everywhere in our code. We’re constantly building lists of data. C++ offers tons of ways to do this, and somehow they all suck.

The lazy way:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ideas about a new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 4”

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.

The annotation continues…

39:00 Exceptions Are Silly.

Exceptions are where you run a bit of code, but you sort of leave a note for the program, “If anything goes wrong, jump to this bit of code and spit out such-and-such message.” Here is the video Blow mentioned, which talks about why exceptions are such a mess.

My experience with exceptions is pretty limited. In my professional work, we used a large codebase that began life in 1994 as vanilla C. Somewhere around 2000-ish we migrated (in fits and starts) to C++. So I didn’t even have a chance to use exceptions until 2000, and we didn’t really have a lot of need for them. Our software was pretty mature and we already had all the error handling we needed.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 3”

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.

The annotation continues…

6:00 Garbage collection.

In C++, you have manual memory management. You need to request enough memory to hold all your space marines. If you need more marinesWho doesn’t? you have to allocate more memory. When you’re done with a marine, you have to tell the system you don’t need that chunk of memory anymore. You can’t ever make a mistake, because using memory you’ve freed causes a crash. Using memory you haven’t yet obtained causes a crash. Trying to free the same bit of memory more than once causes a crash. And forgetting to free memory causes a memory leak where your program will consume more and more until it crashes.

And by “crash” I mean, “It might crash or it might malfunction badly somewhere later and you’ll have NO IDEA where it all went wrong.”

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 2”

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.