When did you last try Java? It used to have pretty serious problems, but it's been perfectly fine for quite a long time. There is a lot of badly written Java software which exhibits problems, but this isn't indicative of the capabilities of the platform.
It must have been less than three years, it was defenetly on my current machine. By the way, it's not just bad software that is sometimes exhibiting such strange behaviour. For example Quake Live didn't work correctly either while Minecraft doesn't give me any problems.
View Postshadowomf, on 03 November 2012 - 02:06 AM, said:
it's a big dependency
This is a genuine concern that is worth taking into consideration -- end-users will need to either already have Java, get Java, or you will need to include the Java runtime in your installer, which can potentially bloat installer size. Note however that programs developed in C, C++ and other languages also often have similar requirements -- support libraries, runtime distributables, etc. -- anyway.
Sure it's true, with C/C++ you do often add additional dependencies, as with any other language. I do even know some commercial software that is written in multiple languages (C++, Visual Basic, Tcl, ...) and that has a dependency package that is multiple gigabytes in size (which is bigger than the application itself).
But if you're trying to be reasonable with your dependencies you can built pretty small applications in C++, that are simply installed and don't require additional setup steps for the Runtime and other libraries. This can be important if you're planning to use digital distribution or want to offer a demo that doesn't take long to download. Another thing is, that these additional installation steps, can confuse some users (What is .Net? Why do I need this Runtime-Whatever? Where do I have to put this <fancy marketing name for a library>?) and are always annoying even if you know what they are doing.
even if a C/C++ coder might give you grief for not caring as much about efficiency and doing things elegantly, in general it does not matter as long as the game runs well enough and the code is maintainable.
Sure, you can always ignore the performance of your application and expect the user to buy new hardware. But with C/C++ the minimum system requirement is probably lower and you might sell more.
Always assuming that:
- the developer knows what he/she is doing, no matter if it's a C/C++ or Java developer
- the developer doesn't have to learn C/C++, in that case it is just not feasable to let him start on a game using C/C++ and will probably result in something worse than what he/she could have done with Java
