Game Programming Language Features
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What features(of any kind:syntax,libraries,design,portability) a programming language ,designed for making games(Pc/console/Mobile), would need to have?
Need? All you need is C.
If you're making a new programming language, there are tons upon tons of requirements, most of which aren't really hard requirements, but things you need to do just to foster adoption and/or migration.
If you're making a new programming language, there are tons upon tons of requirements, most of which aren't really hard requirements, but things you need to do just to foster adoption and/or migration.
It would need to be compatible with all three major consoles and the PC at a bare minimum. That's the first tricky part. Second, it would need to have a mature compiler and toolchain so that developers aren't constantly dealing with bugs in a new language.
A standards compliant, rock solid, fast and bug free C++ compiler and linker that produce small and fast executables for all relevant platforms would be awesome! :)
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Quote:
Need? All you need is C.
You are right , in fact Pascal , Fortran ,even Assembler fit into this claim.
Quote:
If you're making a new programming language, there are tons upon tons of requirements, most of which aren't really hard requirements, but things you need to do just to foster adoption and/or migration.
yes but surely you don't want inline assembler and other stuff for a programming language designed for making games. What would be interesting to see is native suport for graphics/input/sound/concurrency/GPGPU's or other stuff designed to ease the creation process.
i'm not interested in creating such a language (but i find the idea really interesting). Just out of curiosity i want to find out what stuff would people want inside a language designed for this.
Tim Sweeney has made two interesting presentations on this. That I know of. Both slides are available online.
One thing I'd say about a dedicated videogame language is that you would want it to be object oriented. I know in other areas of software OOP has been falling out of favor; in fact some people are referring to recent times as the "post-Object Oriented era" of software engineering, and so forth. But the thing about games is that even the most abstract puzzle game is composed of a bunch of interacting entities that can naturally be modeled by objects. If you write a game in a language like C that doesn't have first class objects, if you write it well, you find you end up implementing a lot of object oriented functionality yourself anyway.
Quote:Original post by Makaan
yes but surely you don't want inline assembler and other stuff for a programming language designed for making games. What would be interesting to see is native suport for graphics/input/sound/concurrency/GPGPU's or other stuff designed to ease the creation process.
Inline assembly is actually quite desirable! It's a PITA when compilers don't support it.
Graphics, input and sound are library features and language agnostic IMHO.
Built in support for atomic operations would be nice, the rest of concurrency can also (and has to) be put into libraries.
GPGPU is rather useless for gamedev because the GPU is often the bottleneck in the first place.
What really eases the "creation process" are good tools, not the programming language. If you look at todays development teams, only a fraction of them are actually programmers.
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