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Comment by 3a2d29 | Hacker News Reader

Right that makes sense.

I’m curious if the gaming industry will switch languages, it feels like with the current game engines that it’s heavily entrenched in C and C++. Feels like something like Carbon has the best chance to break in.

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A chunk has already switched to C# with Unity. Most other engines (proprietary, Unreal, etc) have decades of C++ that would require too much effort to migrate to anything new.

Unity is still written in C++. It's fairly common to write the core engine in C++ and use a language like Lua, or as is more common in AAA, some proprietary scripting language for gameplay code.

Interesting. I heard the Civilization games were Lua, didn’t know that was more common.

Quite common: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_la...

I work on CorsixTH as a hobby which is also c++ and lua.

This kind of thing in general is very common and goes back decades, it's just that the languages used to be custom (QuakeC, UnrealScript etc) before the industry largely standardized around Lua. Some older games also experimented with Python for this, and I recall even seeing Tcl once.

Unity core, written by Unity employees, customers use C#, that is a big difference.

Also since Burst got mature, many C++ modules are slowly being rewritten in C#/Burst subset.

There are a number of Rust projects happening, but not overtaking c++ any time soon.

Only time will tell.

But I think there is an opportunity at this point in time.

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