OSNews thread here degenerates into GC vs not

[Bill Baxter]

Lutger wrote:
> I haven't done any work in 3d games, but what I hear from every single 
> programmer that has is that they will gladly trade some performance for 
> productivity.
> 
> I was so shocked when I browsed the C++ CIV4 SDK, I always thought these 
> professional programmers had a tight and clear codebase for such large 
> applications, well they don't.
> But they are on a tight schedule too and it must be a complex ordeal. I 
> image doing something like this in D saves so much time and complexity, 
> that alone might enable developers to implement higher performance 
> applications. For the most annoying problems with performance in the 
> games I play are due to 'bugs' or design-level bottlenecks it seems, and 
> they are usually patched some months after the release - if you're lucky.

With a tight schedule, a good strategy is to not waste time optimizing 
any one particular thing until you *know* it is a bottleneck.  Game 
developers tend to be pretty ruthless in applying this principle.  For 
the Civ4 SDK, something that will only be used directly by a tiny 
fraction of Civ4 users, there's just not a lot of bottom line 
justification for putting resources there, when compared to say fixing a 
crash bug that 10% of players are likely to encounter.

So yeh, that's why folks like the Civ team and the folks behind Eve 
Online are willing to go with Python.  For most things Python is fast 
enough, and gets the job done much more quickly than C++.  For the small 
fracton of the code where it's not fast enough, you can always re-write 
those bits in C and call it from Python.

--bb