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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> It definitly is, because despite being mostly C#, outside the graphics engine itself, they have decided it is the right tool for some of their projects.

No, it was not a reasonable remark. Pointing someone else's choice changes nothing. The point that you keep missing is that performance is a key decision factor, one among many, and baseline performance penalties imposed by a particular choice of programing is a factor that adds up to all other choices. If you degrade the performance of your offering without any relevant tradeoff, you're making it harder to justify it's adoption.

Feel free to insist in your personal assertion. Those who care about performance feel strongly about gratuitously pile performance penalties without any meaningful tradeoff to show.

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A key factor and yet they are using Unity, because even for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, that tradewort is worthwhile from business point of view.

Minecraft wouldn't never have happened if Notch was busy discussing if it would be acceptable at all doing it in Java.

Just like too many in HN dream of being the next FANG, too many worry about the ultimate performance when their games would hardly win a fraction of Minecraft when placed into the market.

As somebody said above, there is a difference between performance choices made by platform providers vs application writers ( or game studios ).

Getting acceptable performance in my game despite my focus on playability and time to market is one of the benefits of platform choice. I want to focus on my game, not overcoming platform limitations.

I am not saying a single 1% makes a difference but the idea that performance in the platform does not matter is wrong.

It matters when it’s significant, eg. Python can indeed be an order of magnitude slower than a native, compiled language. But much more than 1% can easily accumulate from all the things that are forced on you by not writing assembly so I don’t think it is a fair cut-out point.

Especially that research OSs were written in managed languages, often with better performance!

> the idea that performance in the platform does not matter is wrong.

But nobody said this. Maybe we're too deep in the thread for anyone to remember, so let's refresh our memories. The claim was not that performance doesn't matter, or that 1% never matters, but that any language 1% slower than D is currently could categorically not be considered a systems programming language.

That's even more absolutist and absurd than "performance does not matter".

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