Re:Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones
by nightski on Thursday April 19, 2018 @04:08PM
(#16879636)
AAA game engines could greatly benefit from the type systems. The problem is most (if not all to my knowledge) functional languages with advanced type systems require a garbage collector which is not ideal at all in that type of environment. They prefer the more deterministic latency provided by manual memory management.
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Re:Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones
by seanmcdirmid on Thursday April 19, 2018 @04:47PM
(#16880022)
Unity uses C# as its scripting language, Lua is popular as well. These all have GC.
My friends in game dev do not consider Unity to be a AAA game engine, not by a long stretch.
Re:Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones
by seanmcdirmid on Thursday April 19, 2018 @08:48PM
(#16881350)
Obviously, there are no true Scotsmen. But whatever you think of it, unity is widely used by indies, especially in mobile and VR.
So given that, would they consider Unreal to be a AAA game engine?
Generally it's judged by the types of games which have been produced. Since Unreal has had AAA games released using it, then yes I'd say so.
So then having a GC isn't an impediment to be a AAA games engine it seems.
I didn't mean to imply that it was. But it's not ideal. I believe it's optional in Unreal too, so I'm not sure if AAA games use that feature.
GC is also a very blanket term. There are many different types. From what I understand the Unreal GC gives you a lot more explicit control over how and when it runs.
Having written OpenGL applications in Haskell (not games) I can say that it has no such feature. It's GC is also vastly different as immutable functional languages generate a LOT more garbage than normal applications (measured in GB/s).
GC is not the impediment. GC as it is currently implemented in the majority (if not all) advanced type system functional languages is.