I've been shifting a little more into C++ after decades of C. It takes longer to compile, but I find that a lot of the tedious stuff that I'm doing with C (function pointer structures, etc) is handled automatically in C++, and I kind of like the RAII pattern.
Also, I enjoy embedding Lua in projects for extensibility, so this guy is really pulling my heart strings. :-)
> Serialisation Compared to serialisation in almost any modern language, serialising state in C (or C++) is excruciating. There are no reflection capabilities in C, and minimal capabilities in C++, so you need to manually specify each and every field when serialising or deserialising the game state
Serialization in C has a very long history. Back in the '80s we were defining the struct's and then used rpcgen to automatically generate code that reads/writes them, for RPC calls.
I think the most widely deployed mechanism nowadays is protobuf.
My biggest issues are crashes in programs by someone who writes C/C++ and doesn't take it through valgrind (or even bothering to lint it).
I feel like Google's Carbon could be good, but it's still not ready for general use. I'm surprised they even bothered with Carbon since they had built golang for their server software development.
Rust is slowly getting there, and there could be a good chance of using LLVM to touch the platforms with only C runtimes indirectly.
As in, transforming directly to the LLVM-IR byte code which can be compiled to C or more readily C++.
C99 is a pretty good choice for small gamedev projects like this. There are better languages out there (C++ is not one of them), but tooling and platform support is still unrivaled.
I've stated this before, but on my ancient (12 year old) i7 a sufficiently complex C project (6000 lines, more or less) can completely compile in under a second.
I dunno how much under a second because my build process only reports durations in seconds.
When using vim with the autocomplete using clang, single file compilations can finish in between keystrokes.
> Is there a 0 missing? 6k lines of C is on the lower end of things, especially given how verbose vanilla C can be for basic stuff...
No zero missing. Routines for dynamic arrays/vectors, hashmaps, strings, etc (i.e. the basic stuff) are already in precompiled libraries (*.so).
The programs (there were two) consisted of an agent that sat on a remote box gathering packet traces and listening for commands to start/stop/change expression for capture, and would store+forward that capture to a server, which saved the capture in a format wireshark was able to read.
6000 lines is about right for something of that complexity.
AST representation of 6k LoC could probably fit for the most of its part into the L3 cache of modern CPUs. C and C++ build process is mostly a memory-bound problem.
That's the entire build process, not just the compilation. This means that things in the build (copying files, building archives, linking, etc) get counted as well.
In C, certainly. A short program I wrote took under 1s to compile and about 2s to link.
In C++ this is not the case; compilation is very computationally expensive, with my experiments in Rust leaving me with the feeling that Rust was even more computationally expensive than C++.
As someone who still regularly does C for fun and for profit, I am often left feeling frustrated when trying to compile projects in languages like C++ or Rust.
As an aside, some of the Lisp compilers (SBCL comes to mind) where much faster than one would expect, even though feature-wise it is more or less complete. It's the (I feel) typing and rules checking in complex languages that slows down the compilation, not the linking after everything is compiled.
A full debug build from scratch (with sanitizers and static analysis turned off) of one of my games (including my homemade engine) takes about 1.8s on my 6 years old i7-8565U - measured with `time ninja`. That's about 10k lines of code.
It goes up to 6s when I enable ImGui integration, as ImGui is written in C++.
When I build it with an embedded copy of entire Allegro 5 library, it goes up to 13s.
A fully optimized complete build including both ImGui and Allegro takes 25s. cloc reports 325k lines of code.
During development, most of the time you just compile one unit incrementally, which boils it down to milliseconds either way, so that's probably the figure that's most relevant to your question (although clang-tidy can push it back to a few seconds).
Also, I enjoy embedding Lua in projects for extensibility, so this guy is really pulling my heart strings. :-)