The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective (2005) [pdf]
st.cs.uni-saarland.de
st.cs.uni-saarland.de
Overall just looked like a more comfy C++ designed specifically for game development.
Correction: the language is called Jai https://inductive.no/jai/ Joi is Ana de Armas AI version.
If looking for a more general purpose feature rich newer language then people might want to also check out Vlang (https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md).
This is obviously not as "righteous" as Rust as you put it, but when you look at the source of some shipped games, you'll see that some programming best practices are ignored.
None of this will block Zig from being used in games, of course, but I wish they had a "let me work in peace until I get this working and then we can worry about that small stuff" mode in the compiler.
And when you rely on other libraries that sort of less strict mode tends to start leaking out everywhere since that one critical library you really don't want to rewrite won't compile when you use strict and you don't want to carry a bunch of patches for it either.
The net result is if you don't start out enforcing cleanliness your community of users will unintentionally devolve into unclean over time.
Well since the package manager will be integrated to the compiler, I think they could enforce the cleanliness for people who want to publish their libraries.
yeah. players demand performance because it relates directly to a better playing experience. they demand it with their purchases and their critiques. game developers understand this inherently or they will not be a game developer for long.
honestly, i think a lot of “best practices” are nothing more than an influential person demanding compliance to their preferences, because a LOT of those “best practices” actively reduce developer productivity and runtime performance both; there’s no tradeoff, its just pure loss.
non-game developers could learn a lot from seasoned and experienced game developers, i think, but we imagine ourselves wholly superior when we absolutely aren’t.
It certainly isn't a language for every gamedev shop but some seem to be taking it seriously.
From what I've seen on HN, Zig seams to appeal people who like the “simplicity” of C and find Rust too complex, but I don't think anyone coming from C++ could find Rust “too complex” (a bit different, with a learning curve indeed, but not “too complex”).
These are frowned upon in the game industry circles. Most of the game code is C style C++ with occasional function overloading and classes.
Finally. Someone gets it. It has nothing to do with the language itself. But the culture and philosophy of the tools / language / framework or library.
For people not working there, it's kind of a blackbox in term of tooling / pipeline etc ... when you work in webservices you have a ton of opensource knowledge / tools available, videogame are kind of different they re-invent a lot of the stuff in-house.
My guess is that's probably a function of them thinking they can learn Rust in a weekend, because they are 10x-ers, instead of any inherent problem with the language. There is also a machismo aspect to C/C++, especially in game dev ("I eff with raw pointers all the time!").
But, if you read the article, Tim Sweeney seems to be saying "I want a fast functional language" which Rust is. One thing I am less clear on is whether Rust is better re: modularity and extensibility.
I guess I'd also say there is another, more mature side that takes Rust much more seriously, even on Twitter, such as John Carmack. I didn't know this needed to be said but not all game devs have fragile egos, but, wow, some certainly do.
do you think there's any possible other reason why game developers would choose to not use rust aside from some hypothetical jerkbag strawman that exists in your mind? is it possible that there's any practical reasons you haven't considered?
Ugh. That's not what I meant/said. What I meant was that there can exist a certain belief that there is only one way of doing things, when in fact there may be several. And there can be a belief that, because one has experience dealing with the most unsafe and bug ridden things, that experience is somehow necessary everywhere and all the time.
Perhaps you might try to address the question at hand, is there a certain amount of machismo re: C/C++ in game dev? Heck, everywhere?
> do you think there's any possible other reason why game developers would choose to not use rust aside from some hypothetical jerkbag strawman that exists in your mind?
Oh, totally. I'm reading the comments and looking for exactly these sorts of serious, interesting criticisms.
However, from what I've seen, some game dev criticisms have been pretty shallow from certain segments of that community. In another comment, I explain there are some game devs that have gone really deep on Rust and have really interesting things to say about it. My fear is simply that the more shallow sentiments of these high profile enfants terrible will take hold, because they often do.
FTR, I'm not talking about jblow. I acknowledge his criticisms are superficially similar to what I wrote. At the very least jblow is seriously engaging with the arguments re: Rust, like in this thread. As to whether he's actually seriously tried to learn Rust, I'm unsure. I hope he does.
And I'm not naming names not to be passive aggressive, but for self preservation. I don't know if you noticed, but games can have a really toxic fandom.
Or, perhaps when you say they act big about using pointers, do you mean that they act big about using pointers safely? Because that is different. That's a conversation I began declining to have because I no longer believe it's possible for a person who is trying to use C++ for a task, and has already decided it is the best available tool for that task, to have that conversation with pretty much anybody without it devolving into a pissing match.
There is a reason "I will never be able to get the control I need (but I don't know)" or "I'll have to use unsafe everywhere (but I haven't tried)" are anti-Rust tropes. It's possible for certain game dev patterns to be awkward in Rust (really interested in hearing more about these!), but these other criticisms smell less like highly relevant informed criticism, and more like one hasn't tried Rust, as much as surface-level, mole hill criticism of hypothetical or pathological instances of bad syntax do.
It isn't that one uses raw pointers. It's much more an attitude I've witnessed in younger programmers that if they're not doing it in C/C++, they're not doing the thing. It's about vibes as much as anything else, and I think, when their heros use their own vibe-level criticisms, they only reinforce that perspective.
> Or, perhaps when you say they act big about using pointers, do you mean that they act big about using pointers safely?
No, I wasn't thinking of that, but that's another part of it. And now that you mention it, "My code doesn't have any of these issues" can be yet another defensive tact.
Do you have something you'd like to offer the discussion?
He also wants a garbage collector (pg. 57) and Pascal / ML family syntax (pg. 58). He clearly wants https://nim-lang.org/.
Since this was written in 2005, Rust/the Rust model didn't exist, so maybe Rust is memory managed/ML enough? But I am interested in looking at Nim. Had no idea it was ML influenced.
And I think I read in another comment Sweeney hired an engineer to write a new language called Verse.
FYI Nim also follows the Rust model with sink/lent annotations[0] + optimizes the (not yet default) automatic reference counting with static analysis so that RC overhead is minimized. Nim is like something between Pascal / Rust / Python, not sure why it is not more widely used.
> Sweeney hired an engineer to write a new language called Verse.
Not just an engineer, Simon Peyton Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones
I think a lot of people want Nim, but either don't know about it, or some language feature turned them off. There are a few polarizing language design choices, but every language has something. Perhaps it just needs a killer app using it in some visible fashion (e.g., Lua in Neovim and Hammerspoon).
For context apparently Nim had a few articles written on how to write “red team” software with it and it also got popular with malware writers. Ultimately there’s an issue with AVs being lazy and flagging all Nim binaries as malware. Some of them even ignore binaries properly signed with good keys. Just another reason AVs are terrible.
I understand the necessity to detect known malware, but AVs are definitely terrible if they're unable to fingerprint the actual malicious code rather than the general traits of the toolchain used.
Also, signed binaries have proven close to useless since newly released binaries/installers raise a warning on Windows until several people run them anyway.
I think a lot of game programmers will keep an iron grip on using C/C++ for a while simply because they don't have the luxury of exploring other options. That said, I think Rust is exceedingly well designed to supplant C/C++ - game development really wants to minimize runtime failure cases and push more errors onto the compiler and static analysis due to the size and complexity of the project and Rust manages to deliver that without compromising on the performance needs - Go was a similar hopeful for a while but the lack of exception throws even under controlled situations is very difficult to deal with (I know you can panic and catch panics but it is a very rudimentary system).
I hope so!
https://research.activision.com/publications/2021/09/the-rus...
Not in the actual games themselves yet that we know of, but still very cool!
So while I share the general sentiment, who knows, it might actually work out. Maybe Rust can be tamed.
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective (2005) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139794 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802897 - July 2011 (1 comment)
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044261 - Dec 2010 (18 comments)
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: a game developer's perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1296608 - April 2010 (22 comments)
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer’s Perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029820 - Jan 2010 (14 comments)
This is such a pipe dream. In so many cases you will not be able to verify array index statically except by having the programmer write assert statements which the compiler could do automatically when it can't prove correctness (like the java JIT which can lift out bounds checking from loops).
Instead we have visual scripting to allow people that cannot program at all to contribute.
There are no near future improvements that fit game development people. All people who could have been creating and using new languages are not even going to go to job interviews. Because ads, fin-tech and web are paying a lot more.
The article was about programmers being able to express their intent in code better. Life went completely different way. And most of comments even in 2022 here are still following that old dead end path and arguing benefits of different programming languages that maybe will change game industry.
More generally, there are benefits to every programming language ever made, if you count learning what not to do.
Which is not what I see happening.
I see that now you have 2 layered system forever. You need to fully understand both layers to make changes. You need to keep everything like it was designed so design person will be able to continue their work. You now need to design code blocks to the puzzle to make it look like its a software.
Currently I am coping with what I see and the only feeling I have and I know its wrong, is that whatever prototype team gets from this visual stage has to be stripped for ideas and redesigned from clean slate before going into next steps. But I have been in business long time and I know I will not see any clean slates anytime soon. We are going to ship whatever 'works'.
Resources:
- ~10 programmers
– ~20 artists
– ~24 month development cycle
– ~$10M budget
Artists and designers will rarely break $100k. There will also be project management (director & producer), and QA. Though depending on how the studio is set up, QA might be a shared resource and only get line items towards the end of development.
Tool & software budgets in the games industry are miniscule. Training and continuing education are non-existent. Bonuses hardly exist. You might get a $40 "special sale" office chair that at least four other people have had before you. Unless you buy your own or get really lucky, that keyboard and mouse you're given has been there since the company was founded and are now considered religious artifacts.
A fully loaded team of 10 developers is going to be one lead, two or three senior SMEs, 50% mid-levels (if you're lucky), and the rest are juniors or developers who are (non-visual) scripters building visual (UI, effects, game play) in Lua or some other scripting language.
We can argue the numbers back and forth in endless pedantry, but my salary numbers are going to be pretty close to reality, with $5k to $10k here and there based on current industry trends. I keep my finger on the pulse of the industry pretty closely. In 22+ years, high-end salary of $100K in 2001 has slowly crept up to $130K-ish in 2022. Over my 40 year career I've spent a good two decades doing AAA development, have been senior/lead/tech director and CTO, and run my own studio, built multiple teams and managed large projects and have hired a lot of game developers over the years.
Personally, I think continuing to use C++ for game dev (it is still the lingua franca) is more about momentum than it being the best choice (in most instances).
His predictions on what computing power will look like "in the future" (e.g. now) are interesting as well. Some have played out, others haven't.
Oh, and see what SPJ has to say about quirky fonts: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/38226/what...
Having a comedy font for a dead-serious funeral company technically communicates the required information, yet it's going to limit your audience to those that can tolerate the conflicting tones and the people who will choose to relate to what you're trying to say.
It's really so difficult to press CTRL-A and select a different font? Would it cost him so much to relate a little closer to the tried and true methods?
SPJ and Tim Sweeney don't care about people who are only willing to listen when the other one does it "the right way". They put something out and if you don't like it, you can leave it unread.
I like good fonts, I have bought several "serious fonts" for private use that cost serious money. I would never use Comic Sans in larger texts. I wouldn't probably use it myself anywhere.
But this here is whimsical, and cool, and fun.
SPJ and TS don't have to relate to me, or anyone if they so wish. Just making the point SPJ's argument is quite poor, whatever "brow-level" it exists at.
Did HN's reverence for John Carmack drop because he dabbled in rockets, instead of doing "proper programming"? Stars can afford to be eccentric.
I wouldn't recommend slides like these to a normal game developer giving a speech. But it's preposterous to claim that it might hurt Tim Sweeney in any way.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/john-carmacks-agi-startup-raises-2...