I’ve definitely given GO a look – but it seems to have a major shortcoming in that it does not seem to allow manual memory management. (And yes, for many areas of game development that’s unfortunately still crucial).

I hope I’m proven wrong about that in the long run and GO gets extended in that direction.

C is really too painful to write games, and you have your issues with C++ that are totally reasonable.

Try the GO language.

golang[dot]org

As for a template-specialization based architecture: That’s nasty ;) Especially in terms of compile time. Templates are a major pain there.

And readability and short compile-time are crucial properties for a successful project. The longer it takes to both build the code base and come up to speed with it, the longer it takes to actually build a game – and that’s too expensive already.

The pre-processing is an interesting approach, but I’d like to reduce build times – more dependency checks certainly don’t help there.

Again, in an ideal world, we’d abandon the silly idea of headers. It’s really a crutch that pretty much all languages except C/C++/ObjC have given up on. Well, Erlang still clings to it, which does not make me happy either ;)

Externs consts can solve this, if you don’t mind some declaration cruft and (possibly) lookup overhead. If you do, why not generate an abstracted header in a custom build step?

cat got my line breaks

Since templates can’t be implemented in cpp files most code would be written in header files which affects compile time, readability and means that you can’t easily make a precompiled library from it. Also according to wiki some compilers have problems with partial template specialization but the VS and the GNU compiler should work which in my eyes covers all platforms. And lastly you will not be able to dynamically cast alot.

This is some code im currently playing around with. Dont really have much time with it and it really is just one of the crazy ideas.

static class MyArch
{
  public:
    static char* Name() { return "MyArch"; }
};

#ifdef MYARCH
typedef MyArch Architecture;
#endif

////////////////////////////////////////////
template class SomeClass
{
public:
  void foo()
  {
    printf("BaseImplementation");
  }
};

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////
template<> class SomeClass
{
public:
  void foo()
  {
    printf("MyArchImplementation");
  }
};

int __stdcall main()
{
  SomeClass someClass;
  someClass.foo();
  return 0;
}