Comment by maccard

2 months ago

Every game made with Unreal has GC bolted onto it. GC is absolutely viable for shipping games.

I don't think that's quite true. While Unreal has a GC, it's not used for the low-level components, only for the "user-facing" objects.

  • Which can rapidly exceed in size and count the "non-user-facing" objects.

    This objection really needs to die. GC does not instantly mean you can't program games. At most it locks you out of the tip-of-the-tippy-top AAAA games, but if you were trying for that you weren't going to use "someone's GitHub project" anyhow. And most of them probably have meaningful GC in them anyhow.

    • What’s your definition of tip of the tippy top AAAA games? Because an awful lot of them are using unreal too!

  • Pretty much everything in unreal aside from the rendering code and platform interaction layers is written in uobject and actor land - which is garbage collected.

    The rendering code also isn’t “just” not garbage collected - it eschews all the normal c++ and is written in a totally different way. It might as well be in a different langauge honestly