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Comment by mfn | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised C# is gaining this much traction in the games community despite the complete abandonment of both XNA and Managed DirectX by Microsoft.

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It's the best modern language overall (if you count everything: IDE, APIs, language design, cross-platform capability, capital backing, reach, approachability).

Also XNA is reborn as MonoGame. Microsoft wants to decouple from it's APIs and tools by offloading to OSS and third party (Unity3d).

C# lets you develop games that run on Windows, OsX, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Xbox and PS, while sharing all non-UI and parts of the UI code.

I think this is 90% a result of Unity.

Let's hope Unity will support Rust, too, then...and I guess Go now as well, if Google says they want it for games.

They don't even support the latest version of C#.

Would they have to be ported to Mono to be used for Unity?

Likely not - C# seems here to stay on Unity3D, but speeding up execution through tools like IL2CPP seem most likely.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-...

Unity only supports managed code unless you have Unity Pro, and its not clear to me how well you can use other languages; I think the support may be more for middleware libraries and such.

Good desktop integration alongside P/Invoke, meant many game studios started moving their game building tools from C++/Qt/MFC to C#/Windows Forms/WPF.

So this way C# got a foot on the door, long before XNA and Managed Direct X came into the picture.

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