Re:Memory and C++ Debugging at Electronic Arts [video]
by Zardoz84 on Thursday October 08, 2015 @03:20AM
(#10351315)
There some AA or AAA games using languages that not are C/C++ . Severence: Blade of Darkness (Aka Blade: The edge of darkness), have a lot of code on pure Python. And it's well know that Naughty Dog use a variant of Lisp on his games.
Re:Memory and C++ Debugging at Electronic Arts [video]
by kayamon on Thursday October 08, 2015 @03:35AM
(#10351362)
I'm sure there are - that's not what I said.
Also, Naughty Dog's games do _not_ use Lisp, they use a custom language that looks a little like Lisp, but has no garbage collector.
Re:Memory and C++ Debugging at Electronic Arts [video]
by z3phyr on Thursday October 08, 2015 @06:04AM
(#10351753)
Naughty dog used to use Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL), which was very scheme like. They dropped it for C++. Although they still use a Racket dialect for some gameplay scripting.
Re:Memory and C++ Debugging at Electronic Arts [video]
by lispm on Thursday October 08, 2015 @02:08PM
(#10354720)
Lisps without GC have been used in various places for delivery.
An example was Thinlisp, which tries to be mostly compatible with Common Lisp, but without GC. The compiler for Thinlisp is written in Common Lisp.
G2's Gensym is written in such a Lisp. Thinlisp also comes from them, IIRC. http://www.gensym.com
Some Lisp don't/didn't use a GC, but reference counting or similar schemes.
It's that you can _quite easily_ write a triple A game without using a managed language.
For games, managing memory is not a big problem. For other kinds of apps, it can be. In some apps the lifetime of an object is not well defined. But in games, it tends to be very well defined.
If you want a good explanation of the problems game developers face when trying to use GC, go read Rich Geldreich's post on it (http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/lessons-learned-while-fi...).