kunos,

I see that you are quite skilled and adaptive, so you will be just fine with future changes. In 5 to 10 years - more like 3, what you used and issues you faced recently will be gone forever. With all due respect to your abilities and so forth, you seem to have no idea about the revolution coming fairly soon in game development technology.

It will be years before the most common languages used in gaming today finally fade into oblivion. However, I am letting people know that immense tech changes are coming on the horizon. Wait until Apple becomes twice or thrice as large as Microsoft with the other tech animals yapping and snapping at the heels of Windows platforms. Microsoft has strength in software innovation and this is what will save them, since they are increasingly outnumbered.

Middle level programmers are to a large extent going to be replaced by software and hardware advances. Among the corporate goals is to end the need for much of the line by line coding, once the huge advances arrive. Many current professional programmers think that their C++/C experience is job security. The innovations in automation and code completion, including in C#, will reduce much of the demand for line by line coding and debugging. A new framework in C# must surely be on the horizon which will deliver such innovations if Microsoft is to avoid a collapse. In that case, C++ will prove far too cumbersome for the agile artificial intelligence in the development software of better suited languages for such innovation such as C#. This core .NET Framework language was created with this long range vision from its start as an eventual replacement for C++ in the 21st century. The next framework for C# (based on .NET) will introduce the revolutionary technologies which were conceived in the minds of leading software engineers even before C# was conceived. Didn't you see that XNA was used as a test platform for extending their technology goals to far greater innovations in the next generations? Here is a classic case of people not seeing the forest because of the trees before them.

Everybody will forget that 3Ddreamer warned of massive corporate, market, and technology upheavals in game development in the coming several years, but many game coders will be glad that they were inspired somewhere in the mist of time to be ready for the tech storm.

However, as credit to you - like I said, your adaptiveness will keep you working.

Clinton

Personally I don't mind using something else then C++ for game development, as long as the language has a decent support in terms of tools and libraries, and the language itself is decent enough. I wouldn't mind having a language that doesn't feature any undefined behaviour (everything is either defined or an error) and with pointer safety (dangling pointer protection and leak detection). However, the garbage collector system that several languages introduces is in my opinion not the way to go, as it's a counter-productive method to conceal the symptoms of pointer errors, rather then fix the problems itself. The technology behind garbage collectors is interesting, but it does not belong in a release version of an application, but as part of a debugger, to tell the developer when exactly you are leaking memory, and using a dangling pointer should trigger an assertion you can debug to fix the actual problem, rather then obscure the problem.

I urge the moderator to close this thread and give the conclusive post if possible. I have got the answer, I will use C# for games, but C++ will remain strong in the Engine and Backend development, for long time in the future. That's clear.