Ask HN: Why most of the Game Engines were written in C/C++?

5 points·sk2code··8 comments

I was going through the list of game engines on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines) and was amazed to see that the primary programming language for most of them was C/C++.

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Another factor is predictability. When you write a line of code in a low-level language like C, you have a reasonably accurate approximation of what the machine is actually going to do for you at that point. Moreover, things like memory management are manual and explicit, and you have a reasonably good idea of when they happen and how long they take. In comparison, a lot of higher languages have a significant and not necessarily predictable overhead in the runtime and/or VM.

Uhm performance?

C for performance. If you need better abstractions (generics, OO, etc) you can switch to C++.

Could you be a little more specific? What makes C++ faster than, say, Visual Basic 6? Just curious.

C is designed and optimized to be very close to the hardware, in fact it's called high-level assembler. You can access specific hardware features directly. C++ is the OO version of C (yes I know this is an oversimplification). Other languages, like for example Java creates a logical layer (known as the java virtual machine or JVM) which adds more complexity and makes it harder to tweak your code to fit the particular hardware.

They don't have garbage collection. C++ is still the most capable no-garbage-collection language.

OpenGL/DirectX APIs are the reason

because they are the best languages.

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