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Comment by parski | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely on the money. If you scrape the surface of Game Boy development you'll find that it's even inadvisable to use C since the hardware is so weak (compared to today's standards) that you really need to squeeze out performance at the instruction level.

If GB Studio and GBDK spurs someone's interest to get into Game Boy development, great, but getting the most out of the hardware requires a lot more effort.

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Aside from some a couple performance critical parts of code or if you're trying to push the hardware to it's maximum limits with effects or complex mechanics, C is totally sufficient for writing entire (and performant) games on the Game Boy. Many polished homebrew GB games have been (and are being) written and completed using C.

Of course, now the number of games now being made with GB Studio completely eclipses the number written in C and assembly.

Most of the GBDK/GBDK-2020 API used for C development is written in assembly, so if you use C you get some benefits of using assembly anyway.

Here's a more nuanced guide for choosing which development tools to use. https://gbdev.io/to_c_or_not_to_c.html

And a couple recent-ish examples of polished games:

GB Studio:

https://lumpytouch.itch.io/super-impostor-bros

C/GBDK:

https://pocketpixel.design/super-jetpak-dx-game-boy-rom.html

https://user0x7f.itch.io/black-castle

https://tangramgames.itch.io/tobu-tobu-girl-deluxe

C/GBDK + ZGB:

https://aiguanachein.itch.io/powa

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