Of course, as long as you're willing to live with a certain amount of verbosity. At a certain point you'd be better off writing an imperative DSL that compiles down to Scheme.

Or, you know, just use C++.

I'll quit my backseat driving since it won't be me to write the damned thing anyway.

(But its my personal opinion that C++ is fugly)

Sincerely,
Smug Lisp Weenie

Might as well just code the thing in perl anyway, nobody uses C++ anymore

I was hoping that you'd agree with me, but I see now you exploded my irony meter when you suggesting PERL, that paragon of modernity.

Regardless, I will tell you who uses C++. Students. And also former students and game developers. You don't have to though. Not even because JohnC (John Carmack) broke down and moved on from C to C++ when doing Tech 4. Though I will admit that the extremely stateful nature of OOP fits like a glove with game programming.

This has been a lovely discussion, but if you'll please pardon me, I have an axe in my shed in dire need of grinding.

use PL/SQL, it's the fastest-growing programming language.

C++ is used by any developer who wants to write high-efficiency, cache-conscious code which occasionally uses exceptions and dynamic dispatch.

iow, C++ is used by game developers and outrageously-overpaid consultants who help overnight dot com successes survive in spite of their ****ty, slow ruby/python/php codebase.

Edit: Basically the only reason Facebook works anymore is because of HipHop, a program that converts PHP into C++. You didn't think it was odd that they hired Andrei Alexandrescu, one of the big four names in C++ today?

I think if you use C++ you're better off with Xperl because of the fact that when you try to conjecture in SC2 all you get is a bunch of NFNGNH to install in your PBR Drive2 with the color scheme of a WMP. Just go with S&M IMO.

That's an interesting idea, but I heard that Xperl had cache misalignment problems on IA64 processors. Do you think this could affect the inner join performance of the main game loop?

JonC, you're clearly right that for industry-scale game development, C++ (or possibly C) is the only game in town for good reason, that no other language provide its level of performance or up-to-date OpenGL and DirectX libraries.


Baring the possibility that you are (or aspire to become) a professional game developer, I don't see why aesthetic considerations can't take precedent over performance ones. As an example, DF2 on today's machines clearly doesn't require all the performance advantages C++ has to offer, and I think that hobbyists have to be allowed to focus on the fun of things over all else, or interest is lost (I briefly looked at the Sith2 code and my first reaction was to be overwhelmed). Just look at the success of basic on the Commodore 64.


The matter is ultimately academic, as a good programmer will transcend his/her language (so long as its limitations don't get in the way). And who knows, perhaps some people consider C++ to be a beautiful language (or perhaps merely the only adequate one).

C++ can be beautiful, for sure. Most of the time it isn't though. The Sith 2 code isn't beautiful. If I wrote it today, it would be beautiful.

Games are a special case. They really are, no matter what scale you're talking about. You basically must have native or jitted, you want procedural and/or object-oriented, you want to avoid stop-the-world garbage collection (humans are really sensitive to patterns and this produces a predictable, periodic 'lurch' in framerate,) you want to be able to take advantage of spatial locality for your object pools, you want to minimize indirection. It's not really that C++ is a good language, but the alternatives all force you to make sacrifices.

I'm not saying there's anything stopping you from writing a game in any other language. I'm just saying that the C++ version is going to run so much better that the alternatives aren't worth it.

Nice post.

Reflecting on it, I should have realized the GC problem. The downsides of GC really are a bane for many people working outside of games as well. Without GC, almost all interesting languages are out the window. You have left me no choice but to use...

...Forth. Thanks, Jon`C, you've helped me choose my next hobby project... I'm going to try writing a decent and fast (toy) game in Forth.

Edit: Eh, thinking a little harder, there may be some bumps vis. cache performance and the interpreter....

6.9 GB, yeah that does seems smaller than I'd expect, somehow. Then again, I really don't even remember the typical filesizes of anything from back then.

Minus all the extra crap like screenshots (seriously, there's a lot), the collection of files are all relatively small. TODOA is one of the few over 100MB.

Oh, and the forum attachments take up an obscene amount as well. Enough, actually, that I had to move them out of the SQL database because it was making SQL backups a nightmare.

I usually rename all my backups to txt files and upload them with no compression, hasn't failed me yet.

I wonder why anyone would download almost 700mb of garbage like TODOA anyway...

PURRRRRRRRRnotittiesRGATORY

I'm trying to get under FGR's skin with that. I'm sure there's plenty of cool stuff to download off of Massassi. Too bad no one plays the game anymore.