Comment by tracker1
18 hours ago
Go does surprisingly well at keeping GC freezes to a minimal in a way that you're unlikely to notice... C# has gotten a lot better since the core split as well. That said, there's a lot that comes down to how a developer creates a game.
I was added late to a project working on a training simulation engine, similar to games, where each avatar in the game was a separate thread... man, the GC pauses on the server would sometimes freeze for literally 10-15s, and it was not good at all. I refactored it to use an event-loop model and only 2 other threads, which ran much better overall. Even though it wasn't strictly a game itself, the techniques still matter. Funny how running through a list of a few hundred things is significantly better than a few hundred threads each with their own timers, etc.
> Funny how running through a list of a few hundred things is significantly better than a few hundred threads each with their own timers, etc.
State machines are not in fashion. Exposed event loops are not in fashion. Most frameworks do their damnedest to hide those components.
As for GC freezes, if you're doing a game like project you can always just allocate a few huge arrays at startup and reuse those with no deallocation/allocation in most garbage collected environments.
> C# has gotten a lot better since the core split as well.
It has improved but the majority of games using C# are using Unity which does not use .NET (Core). It uses Mono or IL2CPP specifically with the Boehm GC so it performs significantly worse than .NET and even standalone Mono (SGen GC).
[dead]