Comment by greggman2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggman2 | Hacker News Reader

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There's probably 500+ successful GC based games on the Steam store another 100000 to a million hobby games doing just fine with GC.

I started game programming on the Atari 800, Apple 2, TRS-80. Wrote NES games with 2k of ram. I wrote games in C throughout the 90s including games on 3DO and PS1 and at the arcade.

I was a GC hater forever and I'm not saying you can ignore it but the fact that Unity runs in C# with GC and that so many quality and popular shipping games exist using it is really proof that GC is not the demon that people make it out to be

Some games made with GC include Cuphead, Kerbal Space Program, Just Shapes & Beats, Subnautica, Ghost of a Tale, Beat Saber, Hollow Knight, Cities: Skylines, Broforce, Ori and the Blind Forest

Kerbal Space Program is a lot of fun, but for me it freezes for half a second every 10 seconds... due to garbage collection. Drives me crazy.

Even on a fast PC, Kerbal Space Program audio is choppy because of GC pauses.

It's successful in spite of that, but that doesn't make it any better.

But maybe it had to do with them being able to use a higher level library, not worry about gc, and focus on other things

And a very important one, Minecraft, atleast the Java version. It doesn't matter until you are running a couple hundred mods with lots of blocks and textures, when the max memory allocated gets saturated and it stutters like hell.

I don't think the argument is "you can't ship succesfull game with GC"

You might spend more time fighting the GC than benefitting from it. And that seems to be the experience for large games - simpler ones might not care.

Unity offers a lot more than just a language, and developers have to choose, are they willing to put up with GC to get the rest of what Unity offers.

Minecraft is the only Java based popular game I can think of. And damn did I love Subnautica.

The recent roguelite hit Slay the Spire (over a million copies sold on Steam) is also made in Java.

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