[Semi OT] Language for Game Development talk

[po via Digitalmars-d]

> std::string tends to be more complicated because of the small 
> string optimization.  Most debuggers I've used don't handle 
> that correctly out of the box, even if sorting it out really 
> isn't difficult.

  Almost all game developers use Visual Studio, and VS has 
supported visualization of all STL containers(including string) 
since VS2005.


>This is really missing the point. He knows RAII is useful and he 
>knows RAII solves freeing free'd memory. Maybe it's time to 
>re-watch the video.

  I watched it. None of what he said made much sense.
His claims:
1. RAII is bad because exceptions.
   -Nothing forces to use exceptions, so irrelevant
2. RAII is bad because you must write copy constructor,destructor 
etc each time.
   -No you write a few basic template classes and reuse them.



>Regarding exceptions, they can be used incorrectly, but I think 
>they tend to provide better error handling than return codes 
>*because no one ever checks return codes*.  And when you do 
>pathologically handle error codes, the amount of code 
>duplication can be tremendous, and the chance for errors 
>involving improper cleanup can be quite high.  Though again, 
>RAII can be of incredible use here.

  That is all true, I agree that exceptions are better than error 
codes.
But for games, the general design is that errors are impossible.
The game should never fail so exceptions serve little purpose.

-ran out of memory? Shut game down, this should not happen
-couldn't open a file? Shut game down, this should never happen
-out of bounds array access, invalid iterator etc: abort game, 
found during development, fixed, should never happen.

-networking? This is one place where you do need to handle 
errors, but do you need exceptions just to handle this one case? 
Probably not