developers are sick and tired of the awful tooling and decades old issues with C++, that will likely never be fixed. I for one will never touch a C++ code base again if I can avoid it.
Unity is pretty much the only other game in town that isn't C++, with the occasional outlier (e.g., CrossCode is written in HTML5/JS). And of course, Engines like GameMaker that are themselves written in C++ but whose users don't write in C++. (Well, that's Unity as well)
Even Unity compiles .NET IL down to C++, and then compiles that with a regular compiler to target platforms which don't have a .NET runtime or don't allow JIT compilation. That's more of an implementation detail but it shows how engrained C++ is that the path of least resistance was to use C++ as a compilation target. I think much of the private engine internals are also still straight C++.
The insistence of AoT compilation has, as of yet, not made iOS any better of a platform for games, and only worse. If you really sincerely cared about games, you would at least advocate that Unity be allowed to do whatever the fuck it wants on Apple platforms, such as either JIT and AoT compilation.
The people who fussed over the real but meaningless details like the 10-20% performance gains are ultimately just co-opted by Apple execs extracting rents. Hacker News doesn’t have a good way to deal with this co-opting, people will downvote comments like these as irrelevant to a piece about headers. You guys are not getting it: C++ being shitty and having high inertia is in console maker’s and Apple’s interests, and the amount of energy wasted in maintaining it is entirely the fault of the platform owners, not developers.
And that Unity is used for convenience, as opposed to performance or code quality, right?
And that Unity C# is (or at least was) quite looked down upon by AAA game devs, not to mention even by .NET standards it was tied to an older C# version for ages (I believe Mono was involved too)?
I know it may be somewhat underwhelming, but Tiny Glade[0] is being made in Rust. It is still basically a tech demo, but it has a real-time GI renderer and stuff.
-Jai is promising!
-Jai has been in development for years and there's no examples, no compiler, no github, no website, let alone package management and all the associated documentation
-Yea but he's still working on it!
If he does manage to release it and live up to the hype that'll be great, but until then I will respectfully be in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp :)
It really does seem like the people who complain about how long it's taking either have no context for how long this stuff takes. You can knock out a toy language in a month, sure, but growing an actually production ready serious systems language, with a solid compiler which produces optimized code across platforms, and a complete standard library and solid core abstractions, and a good module system, and incremental parallel compilation which scales to millions of LoC, and with innovative language features which aren't in comparable mainstream languages... that takes time.
It wasn't widely announced until IIRC 2008, and it was public and in popular use by 2011 or so (long before 1.0 - just as e.g. Zig is definitely pre-1.0, but also very clearly a real language that people are using).
How many years are you planning to wait for Jai? Serious question - if it's still not publicly available in e.g. 2034, are you still going to be saying that's just how long these things take?
If it's still not available in 2034, I guess you can fairly say it's taking a while. But then again, so what; if it comes out in 2036 it comes out in 2036.
There's this whole 'passing of time', and "we'll all eventually die", thing though, right?
If it comes out in 2036, it's totally irrelevant for a working dev in 2024 to be concerned with it. So that he'll get to use it in a decade? At this point it's already a promise-ware, and it's like it has community adoption to be promising.
You wouldn't necessarily know, unless they talked about it. Some of the biggest games of the last decade were written in Java or C#, but without necessarily making a big deal about it.
> And of course, Engines like GameMaker that are themselves written in C++ but whose users don't write in C++. (Well, that's Unity as well)
You forget that 30 years ago this was virtually unheard of, at least for "real" games. Writing a new game used to mean writing a new game engine. Now it mostly means writing something for an existing engine.
I'm sure game development toolchains will have C++ somewhere in their bowels for decades to come. But for day-to-day game development work it will continue to slide into irrelevancy.
Citation needed. C++ domains don't go to Go, and have only marginal adoption of Rust.
I suspect rust will gain in popularity in systems software - like databases and browsers. But if we're counting in "console generations" - well, I personally doubt rust will ever really take off amongst game developers. Rust's borrow checker has a reputation for making it hard to write entity-component systems. And ECS are core to modern game dev.
Isn't it the opposite? That rust's borrow checker makes it hard for non-ECS paradigms due to ownership and XOR mutability rules. While ECS is best for rust, as it "owns" things and schedules the mutating functions without any conflicting race conditions.
The most popular engine in rust right now is bevy, which embraces ECS for everything (including UI).
With Go, i believe people will eventually mean revert to C, appreciating the value of simplicity.
https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/2023/4
Unfortunately it doesn't have new projects, but it does seem like C++ peaked a couple of years ago and is starting to trend down. "Plummeting" is clearly an exaggeration though.
(WTF is there a meteoric Java growth is yet to be explained.)
Either that or the institutional memory of Java EE has faded, and Spring Boot is here to traumatise a new generation of developers with the magic of write-only COME FROM code.
Those things you cited do no cause single-month rapid growth. What causes it is publicity, or some large ecosystem adopting it by fiat.
In most metrics there it's steadily rising even, though the metrics are cross-correlated with "GitHub adoption".
But yeah a 0.234% yoy-decrease isn't "plummeting". If so, then things like typescript or python are even steeper in their, and java being the next big thing showing massive growth compared. And rust itself is decreasing according to those stats, so I guess it's declining too.
Let’s not count the GitHub repo that is just a readme.
That was 14 years ago. C++ is not going anywhere, whether 1, 2, or 10 "console generations" ahead.