Me and my friend are interested in mobile gaming. We had released few small flash games before. Before diving into mobile platforms, I would like to know the choice of programming languages. We want to develop for iOS, Android and Windows phone. Which of the following solution will be ideal for developing?

1) Using XNA for Windows phone, Objective C for iphone, Java for Android

2) C++ for all platforms

We gonna develop 2D games only. We need to use APIs like Admob and other hi score APIs. Can they be accessed using C++ native calls? Will it take more time using C++ than separate languages for each platform? Please tell the advantages and pitfalls in both. Thank you

My friend writes code in C++, they use Java & ObjectiveC wrapper to load C++ program on Android and iOS, however he ended up rewriting it for Metro.

you can use C++ but you will write 10x more code then using a Game Engine that can be Cross-Platform like Unity

i heard that you can build games free for Android and iOS

i have here a link with all the mobile game engines

you can use C++ , it actually depends on your experience , you told us that you've used AS (ActionScript) that is High Level.

C++ is Low Level and every project you're making you have to optimize it for you device.

you can create a framework that can call the Files to create a cross-platform game.

and besides creating a cross platform game in C++ you also need experience in DirectX (Windows Phone 8) and OpenGL ES (Android , iOS)

my advice is if you have the experience in C++ , try it why the hell not

if you don't have the experience ? Do Not use C++, use Unity it's easier and faster to create a game same as flash by using Adobe Air

or you can use HTML5.

i hope you can do something with the information i gave you.

P.S XNA is a framework not a language :D

Java is still fast enough by being JIT compiled for your processor and having a memory manager on top of the operating system.

Java's biggest bottle neck is that it only support object orientation so that functional programming look messy.

Java also have a lot of obsoleted things in the framework for backward compability.

For a beginner allocating and destroying many objects, Java will give you a more efficient code by not fragmenting the memory since C++ assume that you write your own memory manager.

C++ is multi paradigm, have many libraries supporting it natively, don't require JVM to run and the language is very flexible.

C++ is very hard to debug if you get pointer errors that randomly write to the wrong memory locations.

For a beginner that use table driven programming C++ can be made quite safe if you use references instead of pointers, don't use C-style casting and always check array bounds.

Thank you everyone. I feel C++ is a better option for us as we know it already.