[GD-General] C# versus C++ for game engines

[Colin F. <cp...@ea...>]

2003 February 20th
Thursday

I strongly believe that C# is a worthy successor to C++,
and my experience of programming in C# has been positive.
The DirectX 9 demonstration programs in C# are impressive,
mostly because they show Microsoft's comittment to making
it easy to use DirectX API's in C# applications.  I may
continue using OpenGL for rendering (via my own wrapper)
because I find many aspects of Direct3D annoying and 
backwards (like the left-handed coordinate system, lost
surfaces, bugs in API that can crash your application,
and general pointless complexity).

I am wondering if anyone has been seriously burned or
frustrated with their own attempt to code a game engine
or complex real-time application in C#.

One of my own concerns is that I wasn't able to immediately
execute a release build version of a C# application
under Windows 98.  (MSCOREE.DLL is the first required DLL
to not be found.  There are potentially dozens of DLL's
required to get a release version C# application to run
under Windows 98.  I haven't explored this yet.)
Yes, Windows 98 may have an "End Of Life" status.
Nonetheless, I am interested in supporting a platform
that still has a significant percentage of the gamer
market.

  (On a side note, I will AVOID upgrading from Windows 2000
  to Windows XP as long as it is practical, because I do not
  like the information gathering, "calling home", and some other
  "innovations".  I am not anti-Microsoft, but I don't like
  the lack of respect for user privacy or security embodied
  in certain products.  Okay, maybe I'll get Windows XP
  for "platform testing" since XP is perhaps the top OS
  for today's gamers.)

I am also concerned about performance.  I have done some
Google searching for performance test results.  The few
test results I have encountered seem to indicate that the
raw processing speed of C# is comperable to C/C++.  However,
the "non-deterministic" (as far as the programmer is concerned)
garbage collection seems to lead to a quadratic increase in
execution time, and large spikes in memory usage, for 
applications that do large amounts of memory-related
operations.

I guess the only way to really know the facts is to
write applications in C# that capture the essence of
what I intend to do in a more elaborate application
and see how well it turns out after trying my best
to code in the C# idiom and optimize.  And then there's
the issue of supporting Windows 98...  Maybe that's
as absurd as a rendering engine that is capable of
falling back on software rendering to cover the case
of a person who doesn't have a $49 GeForce3 card.

But I'd still like to learn about any success / horror
experiences with C# "real-time" game coding anyone
might have.

--- Colin

cp...@ea...