How many people code in C these days, and if so, why?

[Kosmic]

Yes i know there are differences between a machine code DLL and a CLR DLL. But UE4 will handle it with a simple plugin.

Well it's not because you can hack a CLR inside UE4 via their plugin system that's it's a good idea. It's clearly not officially supported. To go back the game you were talking about, Fortnight , I can guarantee that you will find 0 line of C# in there.

And yes C# is indeed not interpreted directly like Python. Its crunched into the .Net IL and this is then JIT compiled to platform specific machine code on the fly. This is the reason why C# is actually really fast, it only needs to be compiled once, then the code is essentially machine code. Sure it might not be the C level of performance, but its not that far behind. Hence why it does end up used in games so often. Most of the complex gameplay related game code is not being executed all the time so it does not matter if the code runs half as fast as it could in C++, it won't run often enough to visibly degrade performance, yet the creature comforts of the C# language make its development and troubleshooting significantly faster (this game logic is often a lot more complex in terms of many more variations in behavior, more variables etc). Games are huge and have long load times so recompiling a game for each test run is not desirable. For this reason a lot of games in the last 30 years have some sort of non precompiled language inside it(Lua used to be popular for this), it makes game development easier, since the non programmer person plonking down game NPCs can just quickly edit a file in notepad while the game is running. The only difference with C# is that its the first such popular language that is performant enough to be used for a lot more than just simple NPC behavior scripts that run once every few seconds. Go have a look at some C++ vs C# benchmarks and see how close to C++ performance it actually is.

I'm well aware of the difference between C++ and C# and even if C# is better than Python, it's a lot worst than C++. Also, speed is not the only problem with C#, memory management and the garbage collector is a huge pain. Almost impossible to solve. Integrating scripting language in professional game engine was done mostly between 2000 and 2010. Like I said before, these days visual scripting is a lot more popular and is normally powered by C++ like the rest of the code.

I have looked at my Steam install directory and out of the 40 games installed 19 of those games had a folder named "mono" full of windows mono dll files. So it is safe to say a significant part of games make use of of it. Tho by now core.Net is replacing mono by doing the same job.

Small indie games made with Unity or with some other small game engine ship on PC with mono yes. Never the case for AAA games.

My point is that non C++ languages are used a lot in game development because they have advantages that outweigh the performance cost. They are still not a replacement for C++. But for the usual one man band engineer writing software to run on a PC with GUI the whole C++ thing is usually not a good fit. The slight performance gain is not justified by the extra time, effort and expertise required. If raw performance was the main metric then everyone would still be doing assembler.

I don't have a lot of visibility on the indie/small game scene, but on the AAA space those languages are not used anymore for multiple years now. Everybody moved to visual scripting and the rest of the engine and code is C++.

Small developers working on small games do what they can and it doesn't mean it's a good idea. For exemple, integrating C# in UE4 for me is an aberration. You should use the engine the way it was designed and put your logic in the visual scripting language (blueprint) and not C#.

[Kosmic]

Another bit of information, C# performance are so dreadful that Unity started working on their own compiler (called Burst) where they compile C# code directly to platform assembly code, skipping the CLR entirely. Only problem is to do so, they had to cut the 3/4 of the language features 

like IL2CPP, their own custom C# compiler is probably not a good idea. Personally I think that for games, C# should be avoided.

[engrguy42]

Why is there always a battle to prove who's "right", when there's no "right" answer??

All languages have pros and cons. There is no perfect language. Coming up with these somewhat irrelevant pseudo facts doesn't prove anything. Yeah, some users somewhere might not like a feature/characteristic, but others elsewhere couldn't care less.

There's always this ridiculous battle to prove who's right.

Just accept it guys. All languages have pros and cons. Just because YOU might not like some aspect of a language doesn't make that relevant to the rest of the world.

BTW, replace the word "language" in what I just posted with any technical thing: meters, scopes, power supplies, etc., and you've pretty much defined many of the discussions here

[Kosmic]

Not a matter of right or wrong, I'm stating some facts and communicating my humble opinion.

It's probably not clear but I love working in C#. It's the language I use for my personal projects. It's just not a good idea to use it for everything.

[SiliconWizard]

If raw performance was the main metric then everyone would still be doing assembler.

I always find this kind of reasoning a bit exxagerated - there's a whole world between an high-level, running on a VM language, and assembly.
Raw performance may or may not be your main metric depending on the project, but even if it's not, you still have a handful of reasonable solutions to choose from.

And that said, for the fun fact, some people are still writing complex stuff in assembly: http://menuetos.net/
Not saying this makes a lot of sense, but it's fun.

[engrguy42]

For what it's worth, for those who might be considering trying Python...

And this is for those who are like me:

- Using Windows (not Linux or Mac)
- Using Visual Studio 2017 (NOT Code), and not interested in picking up a different IDE
- Want to make some GUI-based apps, and are used to the ease of natively drag-n-dropping GUI elements in C#
- Are familiar with C++ and C# in VS, and have a lot of pre-made code you've already developed

Now I'm sure for those who like and have used Python it's wonderful. However, I've spent a day and a half trying to get everything working. I watched a 4+ hour tutorial on Python. I've downloaded and installed every freakin' Python/QT - related thing I can find. I've searched and searched youtube and other websites for tutorials on how to set it all up. And I've learned about PIP and all the libraries you can install.

But at the end of the day, I've pretty much given up. From what I've seen, it's pretty much a much less stringent version of C#. It has classes (which I love), pretty much the same basic functionality as any programming language. But for me, the cost outweighs the benefit. And I'm still not clear what the benefit actually is.

I can't even figure how to run the GUI-making software (QtDesigner) from within VS. There's no tutorials. They're either addressing Qt and C++, or VS Code, or some other IDE, or some old versions, or Mac, or Linux, or some other Python version thingy (Anaconda, etc, whatever the F they are). And it seems all you're doing is running a separate app that makes some UI code that you have to convert to python code via command line. And it's a freakin' science project to understand and find where stuff is located on your drive. And it seems there's also other options for GUI stuff. Which means a more extensive science project trying to figure out what to use and how to use it.

The best resource I found was docs.microsoft.com/visual studio/python or whatever for basic VS/Python, but still it doesn't answer everything. Or anything about Qt. And for that you need to go to the Qt website.

And the Python implementation in VS is different. But not in a good way. For example, I spent 1/2 an hour just trying to duplicate what is a simple procedure in VS C#/C++: select and comment a bunch of lines. I still have no clue. The devil is certainly in the annoying details.

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Anyway, I may decide to pick it up again, but for now I'll just let it sit until I find some real benefit to having Python. I tried. 

[Berni]

Yeah i do admit that small game studios tend to go this route while big AAA developers tend to build there own engines from the ground up. The smaller studios have limited resources so less people needed to code the game the better. Big studios already have >200 artists working on 3d modes, textures, animations, maps..., so who cares if 50 programmers are needed to put together an engine.

But i don't really see the performance gap from C# to C++ being all that big. But i do have to admit that one has to be a lot more careful with programing in C# to actually get that performance. There are some small sneaky details that can cause a piece of code to suddenly run much slower or generate a pile of junk for the garbage collector. Its just a matter of using the profiling tools to identify these choking points and fix them.

A good example of C# in a game is Cities Skylines (Widely regarded as the worlds best city builder game for the last 5 years, having stolen this crown from SimCity). Its still done by a small developer ~20 people but it did sell a lot of copies. Made in Unity with C#, it is simulating 10s of thousands of people individually walking and pathfinding around the city during gameplay while obeying traffic rules (Every single pedestrian,car,train,plane,boat), also simulating water flow over terain and wind constantly. Featuring a official modding api that links in preparsed C# code on the fly without a restart. All of this running nicely performant on a typical PC and will properly utilize larger numbers of CPU cores (if needed for unusually large cities). Its a particularly good example of very computationally intensive game logic being ran in .net.

Not saying that C# is perfect, but there is a time and place for it. Same for C++. I love C/C++ for running bare metal on MCUs, there are many cases when you would want to use C++ on a PC. But just like C#, its not for everything. Still C# is a very good alternative to other similar languages that offer similar features like Java(ie Android apps) while not being a replacement of any kind for what C++ does well. Most of the popular languages exist for a good reason.

[nctnico]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

[Picuino]

For what it's worth, for those who might be considering trying Python...

[...]

Anyway, I may decide to pick it up again, but for now I'll just let it sit until I find some real benefit to having Python. I tried.

GUIs can be made with Python but that is not its strong point.
You can use Python for tasks closer to the command line.

For example I use Python to render my static web page with the sphinx tool.
It has also served me occasionally to summarize large amounts of data in text format.
In fact, it is how I met Python, in a start-up in which hundreds of thousands of messages had to be summarized daily from an entire installation with more than 1000 PLCs. The guys who taught me Python managed to quickly summarize them in a simple excel sheet.
From there I used Python to do a software bug search program in PLC programs.

All of these tasks are alike in that they handle large amounts of text and data flexibly and easily. That is the biggest Python niche.

[engrguy42]

For what it's worth, for those who might be considering trying Python...

[...]

Anyway, I may decide to pick it up again, but for now I'll just let it sit until I find some real benefit to having Python. I tried.

GUIs can be made with Python but that is not its strong point.
You can use Python for tasks closer to the command line.

For example I use Python to render my static web page with the sphinx tool.
It has also served me occasionally to summarize large amounts of data in text format.
In fact, it is how I met Python, in a start-up in which hundreds of thousands of messages had to be summarized daily from an entire installation with more than 1000 PLCs. The guys who taught me Python managed to quickly summarize them in a simple excel sheet.
From there I used Python to do a software bug search program in PLC programs.

All of these tasks are alike in that they handle large amounts of text and data flexibly and easily. That is the biggest Python niche.

Ah, okay, thanks. For me I guess that comes down to balancing Matlab vs. Python, since I tend to run to Matlab for data acquisition and analysis and simulation stuff on large amounts of data.

BTW, what is this "command line" to which you refer? 

I didn't know that's still a thing    I'm kinda allergic to command lines.

[Picuino]

I usually use Python as scripts from the command line together with the make tool.

For example a small utility that I sometimes use is a small script that automatically generates header files from c files. It collects all the definitions of the functions and with them generates a header. It is not very flexible, but it saves me work.
Another small Python macro from the command line allowed me to generate KiCad library files for integrated circuits (they are written in plain text).
Those are examples of another way to use Python. Once you know Python, you can think of many ways to apply it to small daily tasks.

[engrguy42]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

Funny, I was recently watching a video of a guy who teaches C++, and he's been working for years with one of the biggest game companies (Electronic Arts) and he writes game engines for them. And it sounds like he and his company use only Visual Studio.
 

[Siwastaja]

engrguy42, you fail to see the point of Python.

Python is like Arduino.

In Arduino, you solve a commonplace electronic problem by buying a completely engineered finished product - called a "shield", which comes with a complete software, and just write a few lines of codes to instantiate, or configure it. thing.run(); Works great, whenever such already finished product exists. Strong point: you can quickly combine things, use them like building blocks, and the configuration isn't fully fixed, you can make small adjustments on it. And it still looks like it's made by you.

Same is true for Python. You need to solve some common software problem, which has been already solved. You load up a Python library: the problem is solved in C, by the library writer. You instantiate it, write your input data. Strong point: you can easily combine such blocks, to solve larger problems. But just like with Arduino, you are pretty much limited to existing algorithms. Everything is so easy as long as you do series of one-liners to process data. When you start actually looping through data and do your own things from-scratch, not only the performance totally sucks, you may realize the language itself is lacking for such work after all.

This explains the very strange claims you hear, like "Python is the language of AI algorithms, so it is very powerful", while in reality all that this means is that Python is used to load up a complete AI program (which is likely written in C, plus things like OpenCL and similar to utilize GPUs), and just to define the configuration and data structures. For this, the syntax of Python is quite handy. And for such simple use, you don't want strong typing.

I have found zero use for Arduino, and similarly, I have found absolutely no use for Python. But, I mostly do system-level or embedded work.

Please take this comment as a humble opinion, not a scientifically sound exact fact.

[nctnico]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

Funny, I was recently watching a video of a guy who teaches C++, and he's been working for years with one of the biggest game companies (Electronic Arts) and he writes game engines for them. And it sounds like he and his company use only Visual Studio.

That doesn't mean it is a good idea. But if you don't know any better then every screw looks like a nail. Last year I had to make some modifications to the Unreal engine and VS was just not up to the job to take on such a large project and work at a comfortable speed (on a machine with 18GB of memory!). Eclipse to the rescue!

[engrguy42]

engrguy42, you fail to see the point of Python.

Python is like Arduino.

In Arduino, you solve a commonplace electronic problem by buying a completely engineered finished product - called a "shield", which comes with a complete software, and just write a few lines of codes to instantiate, or configure it. thing.run(); Works great, whenever such already finished product exists. Strong point: you can quickly combine things, use them like building blocks, and the configuration isn't fully fixed, you can make small adjustments on it. And it still looks like it's made by you.

Same is true for Python. You need to solve some common software problem, which has been already solved. You load up a Python library: the problem is solved in C, by the library writer. You instantiate it, write your input data. Strong point: you can easily combine such blocks, to solve larger problems. But just like with Arduino, you are pretty much limited to existing algorithms. Everything is so easy as long as you do series of one-liners to process data. When you start actually looping through data and do your own things from-scratch, not only the performance totally sucks, you may realize the language itself is lacking for such work after all.

This explains the very strange claims you hear, like "Python is the language of AI algorithms, so it is very powerful", while in reality all that this means is that Python is used to load up a complete AI program (which is likely written in C, plus things like OpenCL and similar to utilize GPUs), and just to define the configuration and data structures. For this, the syntax of Python is quite handy. And for such simple use, you don't want strong typing.

I have found zero use for Arduino, and similarly, I have found absolutely no use for Python. But, I mostly do system-level or embedded work.

Please take this comment as a humble opinion, not a scientifically sound exact fact.

Siwastaja, thanks. It sounds like what you're describing is, like I say, quite a bit like what Matlab does. Lots of premade scientific/engineering/AI/math functionality that you just grab and go.

[engrguy42]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

Funny, I was recently watching a video of a guy who teaches C++, and he's been working for years with one of the biggest game companies (Electronic Arts) and he writes game engines for them. And it sounds like he and his company use only Visual Studio.

That doesn't mean it is a good idea. But if you don't know any better then every screw looks like a nail. Last year I had to make some modifications to the Unreal engine and VS was just not up to the job to take on such a large project and work at a comfortable speed (on a machine with 18GB of memory!). Eclipse to the rescue!

No, I'm sure you're right. You just might want to warn EA that Visual Studio isn't up to the task. They have lots of $$$ riding on it.

[JPortici]

At this point I tend to agree with Berni. You start up VS, start a C# app, the toolbox with all the GUI stuff appears, you drag-n-drop, and you're off. The code is automatically generated, as are the event handlers.

Trying to shoehorn Python/Qt/Qt Designer into VS is looking like a pain, especially when GUI's are involved. Apparently you need to run QtDesigner separately to generate the .ui file, then use command line crap to convert to .py, and merge your code into that.

For those who have gone thru the hassle and it's become second nature, then yeah, it's easy. For those who have no interest in going thru the hassle, it's a freakin' pain. And at the end of the day, is there really much benefit over C#? Or is it just because it's popular? I couldn't care less what others are using, and whether it's "popular".

From what I've seen so far it's a "loose" version of C#.

In any case, does anyone know of a tutorial on setting up PyQt5 and QtDesigner, for Python, in Visual Studio, that's more recent than 6 years ago?

some months ago i decided to really start with Qt (also because i was planning to do a project using a beaglebone and there weren't many alternatives for UI)
it took me a full work day, with both some tutorial websites and more importantly the examples on the BBB book by derek molloy and i finally cracked it!

Now almost all my applications have custom widget i generate on the IDE. layout is done mostly in code, and the event system is way more flexible to me and the drawing performance is much better.
The only thing i miss from Visual C# is the grid system (and sometimes to know how a QT widget will expand require a sacrifice of a certain amount of goats)
but everything else is a burden

[Kosmic]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

Funny, I was recently watching a video of a guy who teaches C++, and he's been working for years with one of the biggest game companies (Electronic Arts) and he writes game engines for them. And it sounds like he and his company use only Visual Studio.

I can confirm (I worked for EA, Bioware, Ubisoft ... ), Most AAA company use Visual Studio in conjunction with, most of the time, Visual Assist. When you have project with more than 10000 files, the only IDE surviving is VS.

[bd139]

10k files in VS is a pain in the fucking arse. We're at 30k on one project and it barely works. We have guys using vim and command line tools because it shits the bed (as it's still a damn 32-bit process)

As for the debugger. Yeah try opening a 30gb minidump, if windows will even create one without barfing  . Oh and then there's the 20 minute wait for it to cache all the sodding symbols so you can get a stack trace from a thread.

There must be a better way. I think a lot of VS users suffer stockholm syndrome.

[Kosmic]

10k files in VS is a pain in the fucking arse. We're at 30k on one project and it barely works. We have guys using vim and command line tools because it shits the bed (as it's still a damn 32-bit process)

C# or C/C++ ? for our tools coded in C# someone had the great idea to put everything (all the tools) in the same solution. It just kill the IDE. I think it's doing a lot less in C++ because it was never a problem even if the file count is higher.

As for the debugger. Yeah try opening a 30gb minidump, if windows will even create one without barfing  . Oh and then there's the 20 minute wait for it to cache all the sodding symbols so you can get a stack trace from a thread.

There must be a better way. I think a lot of VS users suffer stockholm syndrome.

30gb well yeah it's a lot never seen that.

[Kosmic]

Now I'm sure there are fixes for much or all of this, and I'm sure I'll hear an unending stream of them. And I'm sure some of them involve jumping thru a bunch of annoying hoops. But for me it just isn't worth the hassle.

Your problem seems to be being stuck to VS (which is not the best tool to work on code; it is pretty clumsy).  When I need to work on a VS project I load the same project in Eclipse CDT and use VS only to compile.

Funny, I was recently watching a video of a guy who teaches C++, and he's been working for years with one of the biggest game companies (Electronic Arts) and he writes game engines for them. And it sounds like he and his company use only Visual Studio.

That doesn't mean it is a good idea. But if you don't know any better then every screw looks like a nail. Last year I had to make some modifications to the Unreal engine and VS was just not up to the job to take on such a large project and work at a comfortable speed (on a machine with 18GB of memory!). Eclipse to the rescue!

Something was definitely wrong there. Used Unreal and Visual Studio for years and it works perfectly.

Edit: intellisense was probably running in background. Normally when I set up my workstation it's the first thing I disable  It's the reason why we use Visual Assist most of the time.

[IanB]

And the Python implementation in VS is different. But not in a good way. For example, I spent 1/2 an hour just trying to duplicate what is a simple procedure in VS C#/C++: select and comment a bunch of lines. I still have no clue.

I just tried it and Ctrl-K, Ctrl-C works for me. Ctrl-K, Ctrl-U to uncomment.

[IanB]

As for the debugger. Yeah try opening a 30gb minidump...

I think that is not a "mini-dump", it is a "maxi-dump" 

[engrguy42]

And the Python implementation in VS is different. But not in a good way. For example, I spent 1/2 an hour just trying to duplicate what is a simple procedure in VS C#/C++: select and comment a bunch of lines. I still have no clue.

I just tried it and Ctrl-K, Ctrl-C works for me. Ctrl-K, Ctrl-U to uncomment.

Hey, you're right !!! How come you never told me?? 

I was trying to set up a menu item to do comments. Never tried the shortcuts 

[Kosmic]

10k files in VS is a pain in the fucking arse. We're at 30k on one project and it barely works. We have guys using vim and command line tools because it shits the bed (as it's still a damn 32-bit process)

Just double checked our project and just the C++ code is around 53K files. It's more than I thought.