

Ask HN: Why most of the Game Engines were written in C/C++? - sk2code

I was going through the list of game engines on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines) and was amazed to see that the primary programming language for most of them was C/C++.
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mingpan
Another factor is predictability. When you write a line of code in a low-level
language like C, you have a reasonably accurate approximation of what the
machine is actually going to do for you at that point. Moreover, things like
memory management are manual and explicit, and you have a reasonably good idea
of when they happen and how long they take. In comparison, a lot of higher
languages have a significant and not necessarily predictable overhead in the
runtime and/or VM.

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ergest
Uhm performance?

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pizza
Could you be a little more specific? What makes C++ faster than, say, Visual
Basic 6? Just curious.

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ergest
C is designed and optimized to be very close to the hardware, in fact it's
called high-level assembler. You can access specific hardware features
directly. C++ is the OO version of C (yes I know this is an
oversimplification). Other languages, like for example Java creates a logical
layer (known as the java virtual machine or JVM) which adds more complexity
and makes it harder to tweak your code to fit the particular hardware.

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shrughes
They don't have garbage collection. C++ is still the most capable no-garbage-
collection language.

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dotborg
OpenGL/DirectX APIs are the reason

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stewie2
because they are the best languages.

