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

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 26 November 2020 at 23:10:41 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 November 2020 at 23:09:12 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
>> https://technology.riotgames.com/news/leveraging-golang-game-development-and-operations
>
> Oops forgot to add my text
>
> As maybe people said, the industry doesn't mind the GC, as long 
> as the job is done in an efficient way, GO gc seems to scale 
> super well, since GO is opensource, is it possible to somewhat 
> copy their GC, add their GC as a custom GC (since you can setup 
> your own GC in D)

It doesn't need to be opensource as such, the point is "as long 
as the job is done".

Even C and C++, now the elite languages of game development were 
seen back in the day as "Unity", because any serious game 
developer would be using Assembly (or C, by the time C++ started 
gaining some traction).

This is relatively easy to check still, you just need to go dig a 
bit on archives from books, magazines and BBS/USENET posts. One 
day theses sources will eventually vanish though, and with luck 
some do end up in some sort of museum.

Many also forget that before a language gets traction to be used 
in games, it has gone through the long path of adoption via tool 
building. This is where Java and .NET started to gain traction 
initially, by replacing MFC based tools, and then being the 
languages used for the server side.

Not everyone is doing Crysis (I guess it is time to replace the 
example with Fortnight, written in Unreal C++/Blueprints, with 
their GC infrastructure), and as proven by Minecraft, there is 
more to be successful in games than if the language has a GC or 
not.

Besides, everyone using DirectX or Metal, is using a GC 
(reference counted based) on their game stack anyway.