C++ for Game Programming - Love or Distrust? [closed]

Answer 1

I have written small games in the past with C++ and use C++ currently for other high performance applications. There is no need to use every single C++ feature throughout the whole code base.

Because C++ is (pretty much, minus a few things) a superset of C, you can write C style code where required, while taking advantage of the extra C++ features where appropriate.

Given a decent compiler, C++ can be just as quick as C because you can write "C" code in C++.

And as always, profile the code. Algorithms and memory management generally have a greater impact on performance than using some C++ feature.

Many games also embed Lua or some other scripting language into the game engine, so obviously maximum performance isn't required for every single line of code.

I have never programmed or used a Cell so that may have further restrictions etc.

Answer 2

C++ is not feared by the gaming community. Having worked on an open-world game engine selling millions, I can say the people in the business are extremely skilled and knowledgable.

The fact that shared_ptr isn't used extensively is partly because there is a real cost to it, but more importantly because ownership isn't very clear. Ownership and resource management is one of the most important and hardest things to get right. Partly because resources are still scarce on console, but also since most difficult bugs tend to be related to unclear resource management (e.g. who and what controls the lifetime of an object). IMHO shared_ptr doesn't help with that the least.

There is an added cost to exception handling, which makes it just not worthwhile. In the final game, no exceptions should be thrown anyway - it's better to just crash than to throw an exception. Plus, it's really hard to ensure exception safety in C++ anyway.

But there are many other parts of C++ that are used extensively in the gaming business. Inside EA, EASTL is an amazing remake of STL that is very adapted for high performance and scarce resources.

Answer 3

Kevin Frei wrote an interesting document, “How much does Exception Handling cost, really?”.