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HappySqurriel on 19 February 2012
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Soleron said:
HappySqurriel said:

You're failing to see the core failing of C++ ...

C++ is ill equiped to handle highly distributed architectures, and is completely unsuited to be used for the kind of cross platform game development that is going to happen in the not too distant future. The Actor model in languages like Scala, Erlang and Small Talk/Squeak is far better suited to handle processors with dozens of cores that can each support multiple threads than the primitive threading model of C++; and I feel sorry for any programmer who is forced to maintain a game engine in a non-intepreted language that will run on the PC, Smart Phones & Tablets, dedicated gaming handhelds, and home consoles where there are multiple architectures and OS for each platform type.

Beyond that the "failings" of interpreted languages are mostly overstated issues that there has been significant improvements made over the past several decades. You can see how far things have come simply by looking at Android platforms where all applications and games are run in a virtual machine that is based on the JVM.

I see it the opposite way. I don't see desktop machines going much beyond eight threads for normal use, or phones/tablets either. Adding more cores doesn't make sense for layout reasons as well. Phones and tablets will get slightly more powerful over the next two years to the point where desktop programs can run fine without modification, so C++ projects will be even easier to maintain ports for, not harder.


Except that, with having hit the practical limit of clock rates, about the only way to increase processing power for general use is to increase the number of cores/threads. With it being remarkably impractical to expect programmers to be explicit with creating distributed programs with an arbitrary number of threads, and C++ being an awful language for a compiler to implicitly distribute a program accross an arbitrary number of threads, C++ is a relic that is not well suited to modern programming architectures; and as time goes on this is only going to become more clear to everyone.

This doesn't mean that C++ will disappear overnight, and we will probably see new C++ programs started for years and there will be tons of C++ work on legacy systems for decades, but I see C++ being phased out much the way C was before it.