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Comment by treehau5 | Hacker News Reader

Pardon me asking, Is there a way to save comments for later? This is gold, and thank you for the resources. I have been very interested in graphics since I took Computer Graphics in College (It felt like an applied linear algebra course, but I loved it. It was subsequently the only course I felt like I was challenged beyond my abilities -- I had to take the course twice to get the credit, but I loved that class)

Also just kind of asking for curiosity, do you think a language like go or rust will become popular for developing game engines? I realize game programmers are anti-GC but what if GC technology advances that the performance drop is negligible I wonder.

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Lol, I'm flattered that you think it's worthy of saving. If you upvote it will show up in your profile in upvoted comments. Also, if you click on the date in the header of the comment, a favorite button should appear. When you favorite a comment it will show up in your profile in favorite comments.

> Also just kind of asking for curiosity, do you think a language like go or rust will become popular for developing game engines? I realize game programmers are anti-GC but what if GC technology advances that the performance drop is negligible I wonder.

I think it will but on some level, the needs of a game engine are different from the needs of say a DNS server. Jonathan Blow, the developer behind Braid (http://braid-game.com/) and Witness (http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/) has been working on a language called Jai https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md even though he's aware of Rust and Go. He talks about some of his reasons in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ

One of the things he mentions is that the game industry doesn't care about security that much (which I didn't realize until then but it makes sense) compared with a DNS server or something so his ideal language might have different design considerations than Rust.

> Is there a way to save comments for later?

Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'favorite'. Favorite stories and comments are visible from your profile page. Note that these are public, so users can browse each others' favorites.

> do you think a language like go or rust will become popular for developing game engines?

That depends on the type of engine :)

Many games will be perfectly fine in a GC language. (People do write JS games all the time :). But as you approach the limits o

f a devices performance, GC has an overhead that is visible.

You can work around it - there are patterns that essentially work around the collector by recycling objects - but it's quite a bit of engineering effort, and it's a very different style.

But the big issue in GC'ed environments is that you give up control over heap growth. Working with fixed memory budgets becomes a very difficult thing to achieve. And there are few things game developers hate more than unpredictability :)

If you want to look at ongoing efforts, Amethyst is trying in Rust: https://github.com/amethyst/amethyst

Tap the time (x mins/hours ago) of the comment you want to favourite. That should take you to a page where you can favourite it

> Is there a way to save comments for later?

I usually just upvote. You can view your list of upvoted posts/comments in your profile page.

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