{"id":900,"date":"2010-02-04T18:38:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T00:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=900"},"modified":"2010-03-23T07:09:19","modified_gmt":"2010-03-23T13:09:19","slug":"c-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/c-baby\/","title":{"rendered":"C++, Baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was catching up on the Communications of the ACM<\/em>, and noticed this article, Computer Science in the Conceptual Age<\/a>. The “catch your eye” text on one page was: “Programming interns\/job seekers from our program Spring 2009 (35 interviewed in the game industry) found no companies administering programming tests in Java.”<\/p>\n

There are other chewy bits, such as: “The USC experience is that 100% of its students interviewed for programming positions are given three-to-four-hour-long programming tests, with almost all companies administering the tests in C++.”<\/p>\n

Also, this: “The game industry will also tell you that it wants the first four programming classes in C++, not Java, according to M.M. McGill and my own private communications with directors of human resources in major game-development companies.”<\/p>\n

One final morsel: “Many game companies say they will not interview or hire someone whose first programming language is Java.”<\/p>\n

Wow, that last one’s harsh, especially since my experience with two teenage sons (one in high school, the other a freshman computer science major) is that Java is the norm for the first “real” language taught (I don’t count Scheme<\/a> as a real, “you’ll get paid programming in it” type of language). I don’t think I’d rule someone out for knowing Java first, though having gone from C++ to Java and then back, the transition from Java to C++ is like being thrown out of the promised land: you suddenly again spend half your time messing with memory in one form or another. C# and Java are darn productive in that way.\u00a0And, no, for me at least, those auto-pointer classes in C++<\/a> never quite seem to work—they need a different sort of discipline I don’t appear to have. I also love that my first Java program<\/a>, from 1997, still works on the web; some of my C++ programs from back then won’t run on Vista or Windows 7 because the WinG<\/a> DLLs are not a part of those operating systems (thanks, Microsoft).<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the article’s right: at Autodesk we’ve dabbled with Java and C#, I’ve seen Python used for UI control around the fringes of a program, but the heart of client-side graphical programs is almost always C++ (or isn’t, with regrets and cancellation often soon following—been there myself<\/a>, though Java was only a little bit to blame<\/a>, to be fair). Also, XNA, which uses C#,\u00a0does not have a 64 bit version<\/a>. In addition, Microsoft’s managed code support usually lags behind the “real” DirectX, i.e., the one for C++.<\/p>\n

Looking around, I did find an open-source project, SlimDX<\/a>, that does support 64-bit assemblies for interfacing with DirectX. Interestingly, they claim one AAA game title shipped using SlimDX, but no mention of which. So I asked<\/a>. They’re keeping the information confidential, which is fine, but the other comment sounds about right: “The large majority of professional commercial PC\/console games are still developed in C++ because of the sheer amount of legacy code the studios developing those games have that is already in C++ (and because of the generally poor support from major console vendors for languages other than C or C++, which contributes to lock-in).”<\/p>\n

Long and short: it’s C++, baby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was catching up on the Communications of the ACM, and noticed this article, Computer Science in the Conceptual Age. The “catch your eye” text on one page was: “Programming interns\/job seekers from our program Spring 2009 (35 interviewed in the game industry) found no companies administering programming tests in Java.” There are other chewy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,7],"tags":[322,33,323,281,324,45],"class_list":["post-900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reports","category-resources","tag-c","tag-directx","tag-java","tag-programming","tag-scheme","tag-xna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}