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Comment by nether | Hacker News Reader

Will we ever see a AAA video game title written in anything else?

It depends on how you define "AAA". Any big-name game written before the mid-to-late-90s (Mario, Tetris, etc.) wouldn't have been written in C++. Mobile games (Angry Birds, Candy Crush, etc.) cannot be written in C++ by dint of their platforms. Minecraft, a contender for the best-selling game of all time, is written in Java.

Angry Birds most likely was written (at least partially) in C++ as Rovio has confirmed that they used Box2D, a C++ physics engine, as the engine for Angry Birds.

All the major mobile platforms support C++. Android through the use of the NDK. Windows phone has support C++ since version 8. iOS has supported C++ as long as there has been the app store, either through Objective-C++ or C++ libraries with a C interface.

Sadly Android supports C++ just for libraries, any attempt to write a serious app in the NDK instead of a game, lands you in JNI wrapping land.

I'm doing it now for my first Android app and the JNI isn't as bad as I expected. I'm using juce and it has a bunch of macros that reduce the JNI calls down to 1 line, and there are a classes to convert the types. The UI is all in a webview anyway. It took me under two weeks to learn the Android tools and get a pretty significant app ported.

But I was horrified at how bad the tools and emulator are. I spent more time trying to get things to work rather than porting code.

C++ wasn't always there.

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