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Language Savvy

Friday, July 22, 2005

Jon Trainer mentions Objective-C in relation to my game engine article. I never programmed Objective-C. As far as I know, the language is only in active use among Mac developers. I did a quick web search and it seems like a nice enough language.

I use C++ in my articles since I assume that it is the language most people use for game development. As my regular readers will know, C++ isn't my favourite language, but I've accepted it as the best tool for the job and now that I stopped working against it, I'm having fun with it again.

I'm always on the lookout for more languages I can use, though. Not to replace C++, but to work in conjuction with it. I'd like to be able to pick the best language for a certain problem. In the last two months, I picked up Python and Lua; Python for automating tasks and Lua to add scripting capabilities to my programs. I also plan to look into languages that follow a completely different programming paradigm, like Prolog and Haskell.

Am I correct in assuming that most people reading this are using C++ for game development? Would you prefer I used another language (programming language) for my articles? Also, what platforms are you people using? Linux, Mac, Windows?

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Comments

GBGames says:

I use C++ and Gnu/Linux, so except for any Win32 specific portions, your code examples are always perfect for me. While solid code to show how something works is important, I think the general theory behind it is the main thing to learn. Again, I use C++ and so love that the examples you use happen to also use C++, but I am sure I could follow along if you used Objective-C or Java as well. And judging from your last code example, your use of platform specific code is at a minimum, so I could see that it will be a minor thing to make it work on my own platform choices. And if you are interesting in Prolog or Haskell, why not also talk about LISP? B-)

Monday, July 25, 2005 1:34 AM


Jon Trainer says:

Though I mentioned Objective-C, I think that the majority of what you are covering in your articles seem to be implementation agnostic. I personally don't prefer one language over another. I'm currently using C and Allegro for learning, some game prototyping and experimentation. I'm planning on using Objective-C and OpenGL for actual projects, and in my "real life" I spend most of my time in C#. They are all useful in their own ways and for their own strengths. I wouldn't worry so much about language and continue in the fashion you have started. You've given us a great introduction to game programming with a design following Model-View-Controller pattern. This is all much more important than what language or compiler you use. Once again, thanks for the great articles.

Monday, July 25, 2005 4:59 PM


Alena says:

I heard that Objective-C is used on mobile devices, because it's faster. As for me, I use C++ , Windows. Thank you for articles.

Sunday, July 31, 2005 12:22 AM

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