Re:Google is developing its own Android game console - Report
by shock-value on Friday June 28, 2013 @12:51AM
(#5956336)
pcwalton already explained that you're underestimating the burden of garbage collection (and I'd add to that that the speed of execution matters more than you realize too). But another real factor is the fact that mountains of code, including complete game engines, have already been written in native languages. Why throw all that out just to program in a language like Java (itself certainly not without its warts)?
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Re:Google is developing its own Android game console - Report
by wavefunction on Friday June 28, 2013 @01:33AM
(#5956437)
This is assuming you're talking about "twitch" gaming. There's a huge market out there for games that can be written as inefficiently as necessary, since the casual audience is just looking for a diversion from whatever they're doing IRL.
It seems like hard-core gamers and game developers forget that pretty frequently.
Re:Google is developing its own Android game console - Report
by objclxt on Friday June 28, 2013 @06:09AM
(#5957135)
...this may be true, but there's also a huge market for games that run on iOS and Android. And since iOS doesn't support Java, but Android does support C/C++ through the NDK, it makes complete sense to go down that road.