I Write Games in C (yes, C)

Posted by valyala 4 hours ago

I Write Games in C (yes, C)(jonathanwhiting.com)

55 points | 25 commentspage 2

andreldm 1 hour ago||

I was also really surprised with Haxe, I share the author’s concerns about its future, other than it’s quite fun to work with.

dismalaf 1 hour ago|

Haxe is a great language but it feels like the ecosystem has been stagnant for 10 years. No Vulkan bindings, no SDL3, still trying to be a web language that happens to compile to native code instead of getting with the times and going fully native + maybe wasm. Part of me wants to write my own bindings to SDL3 in Haxe but it's far easier to just use Odin these days.

graemep 1 hour ago||

> when it comes to compilation I can't think of anything faster.

What languages compile fastest?

levodelellis 43 minutes ago||

IIRC go wasn't that fast but can feel like it in vscode. IIRC vscode compiles go using the lsp which is faster than launching a process because for some reason, vscode stalls for a second or more before launching a process.

I can't remember how fast D was but iirc it was fairly fast. Actual fastest is my compiler which I don't work on anymore and isn't ready for production. It's the only compiler I know of that hit millions of lines <1s in a non trivial language https://bolinlang.com/

tmtvl 33 minutes ago|||

Not every compiled language has a de facto standard compiler, but with SBCL Common Lisp compiles pretty quickly. The Pascals (and Delphi) also tend to have rather fast compile times. I believe Jai is supposed to compile quickly but I'm not in the beta so I don't know. C can be quite good if you know what you're doing and use a decent compiler.

gfody 54 minutes ago|||

nothings faster than turbo pascal

arcologies1985 1 hour ago||

Rust can be up there with C depending on the project.

NewsaHackO 1 hour ago|||

is that a joke?

enricotr 1 hour ago|||

Any language can be, depending on the project. Rust compile is slower than C, on more than average. That's it.

leecommamichael 1 hour ago||

Come try Odin!

andai 1 hour ago||

+1 for Odin

Did a bit of game dev in Odin last year and it was a wonderful experience. It's very much game dev oriented and comes batteries included with many useful libraries. And the built in vector stuff is very helpful there too.

doublerabbit 57 minutes ago||

I've been doing theory and really want to myself.

Time escapes me before I get a chance to type Hello World. Working in front of a screen eight hours a day leaves me exhausted that the least things I want to do is code more on my day off.

Although wanting to dive in to WASM has been a priority and checking Odin for wasm their 3D model example is super cool.

May just have to take a poke. TCL for web frontend; Erlang for DB and potentially Odin for wasm? This could be a cool mix.

webdevver 2 hours ago|

its funny how writing games in C is now seen as some kind of 'hardcore mode', despite the fact that a huge number of excellent titles up to and including the 2000s were written that way.

the core of games tend to be a 'world sim' of sorts, with a special case for when a select entity within the world sim gets its inputs from the user.

where C becomes a chore is the UI, probably has to do with how theres many more degrees of freedom (both in terms of possibilities and what humans consider appealing) in the visual plane than there is in the game input 'plane', which might be as little as 6 independent inputs plus time.

namuol 2 hours ago||

> UI in C

Try Clay!

https://www.nicbarker.com/clay

pansa2 1 hour ago||

There’s also CimGUI. I know the underlying C++ library is well-regarded - I’m curious to hear people’s experiences using the C wrapper.

https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

glimshe 27 minutes ago|||

Rollercoaster Tycoon was written in assembly! C was easy mode back in the day...

pengaru 1 hour ago||

For quite some time even games technically written in C++ were more appropriately described as C compiled by a C++ toolchain with a minimum of actual C++ syntax - more like C with classes.