Comment by eru
2 days ago
> As shitty as C++ is from today's PoV, the entire gaming industry switched over within around 3 years towards the end of the 90s.
Did they? What's your evidence? Are you including consoles?
Btw, the alternatives in the 1990s were worse than they are now, so the bar to clear for eg C or C++ were lower.
I was there Gandalf... ;) Console SDKs offering C or C++ APIs doesn't really matter, because you can call C APIs from C++ just fine. So the language choice was a team and engine developer decision, not a platform owner decision (as it should be).
From what I've seen, around the late mid-90's, C++ usage was still rare, right before 2000 it was already common and most middleware didn't even offer C APIs anymore.
Of course a couple of years later Unity arrived and made the gamedev language choice more complicated again.
As another Gandalf, Playstation 2 was the very first console to actually offer proper C++ tooling.
That would be 2000, until then Sega, Nintendo and Playstion only had C and Assembly SDKs, even the Playstation Yaroze for hobbists did get released only with C and Assembly support.
PC was naturally another matter, especialy with Watcom C/C++.
> I was there Gandalf... ;)
You were at most in one place. My question was rather, which corners of the industry are you counting?
However you are right that one of the killer features of C++ was that it provided a pretty simple upgrade path from C to (bad) C++.
It's not just API calls. You can call C APIs from most languages just fine.
My corner of the industry back then was mostly PC gamedev with occasional exploration of game consoles (but only starting with the OG Xbox. But that doesn't really matter much since it was obvious that the entire industry was very quickly moving to C++ (we had internet back then after all in my corner of the wood, as well as gamedev conferences to feel the general vibe).
id Software was kinda famous for being the last big C holdout, having only switched to C++ with Doom 3, and development of Doom 3 started in late 2000.