Comment by db48x
1 day ago
You misunderstood. Game developers should use a _good_ third–party library, not a _bad_ one. At a minimum they should be able to read the source code so that they know it is good. Thus open source libraries should be at the top of the list.
If you don't know what “good” looks like, take a look at [Serde](https://serde.rs/). It’s for Rust, but its features and overall design are something you should attempt to approach no matter what language you’re writing in.
There are no good third party libraries
I disagree. Serde is not merely good, it is excellent.
The only C code that I have recently interacted with uses a home–grown JSON “library” that is actually pretty good. In particular it produces good error messages. If it were extracted out into its own project then I would be able to recommend it as a library.
But how is that C project using a custom made JSON library doing better than Rockstar games doing the same? Because that library has good error messages?
Apart from that, many of us thought that Java serialization was good if just used correctly, that IE's XML parsing capabilities were good if just used correctly, and so on. We were all very wrong. And a 3rd party library would be just some code taken from the web, or some proprietary solution where you'd once again have to trust the vendor.
2 replies →