At my first real dev job a big portion of my work heavily involved the Qt framework and, while at the time lambdas were still a big missing sore point, using that framework and their widespread habit of passing by const ref instead of pointer made me like C++ a lot more. I completely understand that pointers and dynamic memory management exists for really good reasons, but isolating global object creation into your main and leaning on internally managed lists of objects can be really strong from the perspective of writing good testable code.

I've been working primarily in PHP for a while now (and honestly put a lot less value on language comparison) but from what I've seen the expressiveness and power of C++ (at least in the ways I like it) have mostly been superseded by Rust and I think that'd be where I started if I ever need to work on something where in application logic would actually be a product bottleneck (instead of data source interaction).

Is Unreal Engine world-class software? I've heard a lot of negative things about it so it's hard to tell if it's just one of those things people complain about because its so popular or if it really does get things wrong

Bad things compared to what? Unity which does not have half the features out of the box and every other game implements basics like FPS limiter wrong?

Frostbite or Dawn Engine with its bad editors and performance problems?

Crytek used by few games? (This one has a chance to challenge UE) Unigine which is also rather rare?

People tend to complain about game engines because they're just so accessible, yet allow you to do extremely complex things.

For example if I wanted to make a 3D platformer in unity, I could probably commission an artist to create the character, download a starter kit of some sort, and be done with it in about a week.

However this means I'm tying in so much code, and if anything doesn't work exactly the way I expect it I can complain. I might complain about the starter kit I purchased, I might complain about Unity crashing when the real reason for the crashes are my own crappy code.

Particularly when I was younger, I would often try to do way too much at once and this leads to frustration. But, theoretically you could create the next gears of war with three other people in about a year. Odds are you're going to run into tons of problems though just because it's so hard to do that

> theoretically you could create the next gears of war with three other people in about a year

this is simply not true

Bright Memory was created by a single person. Keyword being theoretically, in reality you'd just go insane

Heck, most modern C compilers are written in C++ as well.

Right, Browsers too are written in c++ for the most part