Garbage Collection and gamedev - tl;dr Yes we want it, so let's solve it

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Wednesday, 25 November 2020 at 07:58:13 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
> Unity moving to incremental GC
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fks2NArDc0

I love the irony there.

Two top game engines in the world use garbage collection (Unity, 
Unreal), and the problem they _had_ is: a missed frame 60fps to 
30fps (I wouldn't be able to see it). The example to show this is 
of course a FPS game where players can see this. It's not a 
common game genre to make for most companies if I understand.

That problem would probably be solvable will less memory 
allocation. But it hurts developer experience so the engine deals 
with that. "The GC is perfectly adequate in high-performance 
scenario" would be a logical conclusion.


BUT In the blogging and recruiting world though, Amazon will say 
on the AWS blog that
"Because Rust does not require a runtime or garbage collector, it 
is able to achieve runtime performance similar to C and C++."
https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-and-how-wed-like-to-help/

People really do like the idea that GC prevents top performance, 
disregarding that _Fortnite_ has a garbage collector.