Comment by georgeecollins
9 months ago
I worked on many of Activision's games 1995-2000 and C++ was the overwhelming choice of programming language for PC games. C was more common for console. In 1996 the quality of MSFT IDE/ Compiler, plus the CPUs available at the time was such that it could take an hour to compile a big game. By 1998 it was a few minutes. As I recall I think MSFT purchased another companies compiler and that really changed Visual Studio.
I was a developer on the Microsoft C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. We definitely didn't purchase someone else's compiler in that time. We looked at the EDG front end at various times but never moved over to it while I was there.
Perhaps the speed-up you remember had something to do with the switch-over from 16 bits to 32, which would have been the early to mid 90s. Or you're thinking of Microsoft's C compiler starting from Lattice C, back in the 80s before my time. There was also a lot of work done on pre-compiled headers to speed compilation in the latter half of the 90s (including some that I was responsible for).
I heard that early versions of C++ IntelliSense from Visual Studio used Edison Design Group's (EDG) front end. Is that true? No trolling here -- honest question. If yes, are they still using it now?
Not true by the time I retired in 2007, but I've got a vague memory of talking to someone on the C++ front-end team some time after that and EDG for IntelliSense being mentioned. So no idea if that's really true or not, and if so, whether that's true today.
I was heavily involved in the first version of C++ IntelliSense, roughly 1997?, and it was all home-grown. It was also a miracle it worked at all. I've blocked out most of the ugly details from my memory, but parsing on the fly with a fast enough response time to be useful in the face of incomplete information about which #if branches to take and, especially, template definitions was a tower of heuristics and hacks that barely held together. Things are much better nowadays with more horsepower available to replace those heuristics.
I was a teenager at that point. I learnt C in the early 90s and C++ after 96 IIRC. Didn’t start professionally in games until 2004 though!