C++ for Game Programming - Love or Distrust?
<p>In the name of efficiency in game programming, some programmers do not trust several C++ features. One of my friends claims to understand how game industry works, and would come up with the following remarks:</p>

<ul>
<li>Do not use smart pointers. Nobody in games does.</li>
<li>Exceptions should not be (and is usually not) used in game programming for memory and speed.</li>
</ul>

<p>How much of these statements are true? C++ features have been designed keeping efficiency in mind. Is that efficiency not sufficient for game programming? For 97% of game programming? </p>

<p>The C-way-of-thinking still seems to have a good grasp on the game development community. Is this true?</p>

<p>I watched another video of a talk on multi-core programming in GDC 2009. His talk was almost exclusively oriented towards Cell Programming, where DMA transfer is needed before processing (simple pointer access won't work with the SPE of Cell). He discouraged the use of polymorphism as the pointer has to be "re-based" for DMA transfer. How sad. It is like going back to the square one. I don't know if there is an elegant solution to program C++ polymorphism on the Cell. The topic of DMA transfer is esoteric and I do not have much background here. </p>

<p>I agree that C++ has also not been very nice to programmers who want a small language to hack with, and not read stacks of books. Templates have also scared the hell out of debugging. Do you agree that C++ is too much feared by the gaming community?</p>
