On 7 January 2012 21:00, Froglegs <lugtug@gmail.com> wrote:

Well games often already integrate scripting languages, generally Lua or Mono, which are both GC based. But this is for the game logic, not for the high performance parts of the code.

Indeed. And this is usually just to mitigate the fact that C++ is so crap at this sort of code. Maybe D will be tolerable, and this breaking out to script won't be necessary? (though I'm dubious)

For a GC to be used at the C++/D layer it would need to be

1) optional always, D makes it optional but you loose a solid chunk of the language if you ditch GC, what remains is in some ways inferior to C++(no escaping lambda without GC, /cry)
2) no long pauses ever

I think most game engine stuff will continue to be written without GC, as it doesn't really add much if what you are after is raw performance. And C++ does have smart pointers which perform much of what a GC does, but without the long pauses or non deterministic destruction.

I must generally agree, I expect the GC would offer me basically nothing but nuisance in engine level code. I'm generally shovelling large, strictly controlled buffers which need proper placement/alignment, pool allocation, or allocation from temporal ring buffers and that sort of thing.

I don't typically find C/C++ intolerable, or even particularly unpleasant for engine level code as it is, it's the higher level code I'm keen to escape.