Re: My thoughts on C# and gaming.

Miguel,

We thought about using Mono for a while, and it still isn't out of the
question.

We have taken some shortcuts to make our implementation a little easier.
For instance we are currently only supporting single-dimension arrays.  And
a few things are cleaner since we're starting off with generic support and
not having to deal with COM.

Maybe this deserves another discussion regarding "What would make C# ideal
for games"? I certainly would like to hear peoples thoughts on it.

-doug

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Miguel de Icaza <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello Doug,
>
> Your description of making a C#-like language looks interesting.   You
> might save some time by reusing our open source C# compiler and adding a
> separate a separate backend that generates your C++ code from it.
>
> > Doing this does have advantages over using Mono or .Net, in that we
> > can fine tune memory allocators and garbage collection to what we want
> > vs what someone else decides to do (see XNA on 360's GC for a reason
> > of why this will be nice).  And we reduce some overhead by not
> > including language features that we do not need (LINQ/etc).
>
> You could plug a different allocator into the runtime and control the
> lifespan of objects if you chose to.   A few years ago we modified
> Mono's VM for to support allocating objects from different pools, the
> hack no longer works, but it is a few hours worth of work.
>
> The basic idea was to add an attribute to a class that stated where the
> data was going to be allocated from, like this:
>
>        [Pool (Constants.ImagePool)]
>        class MyBlob {
>                ...
>        }
>
> The runtime looks this up when it instantiates the class, and instead of
> allocating the objects from the GC, it would allocate it from the given
> pool.   The pool is managed elsewhere and all of the objects are
> disposed with no warnings of any kind.
>
> You do loose the safety (say, you keep an object alive after you
> released the pool), but you get the control that you need.
>
>

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