Lamothe's Black Art book came out in '95. Abrash's black book came out in '97.

Borland C++ was pretty common and popular in 93 and we even had some not-so-great C++ compilers on Amiga in 92/93 that had some use in gamedev.

SimCity 2000 was written in C++, way back in '93 (although they started with Cfront)

An absolute fuckton of shareware games I was playing in the 90s were built with Turbo C++.

I really hope that C++ evolves with gamedev and they become more and more symbiotic.

Maybe adoption of rust by gamedev community isn't the best thing to wish to happen to language. Maybe it is better to let other crowd to steer evolution of rust, letting system programming and gamedev drift apart

I sometimes wonder if the problem with rust is that we have not yet had a major set of projects which drive solutions to common dev problems.

Go had google driving adoption, which in turn drove open source efforts. The language had to remain grounded to not interfere with the doing of building back-end services.

Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. While there are more than a few companies uinf rust for small projects with tough performance guarantees - I haven't seen the “we manage 1-10 MM sloc of complex code using rust” type projects.

Exactly, it's all about the ecosystem and very little about the language features

> and didn't become popular for gamedev until the turn of the millenium

Wasn't this also because Microsoft had terrible support for C?

Since the mid-90's, a number of gamedevs moved to C++ but were unhappy with the results.. how OOP works, exception handling, the STL, etc.

My understanding is.. by late 90's.. many game developers, despite using C++, we still coding more inline with C programming than (proper) C++.

Mostly C code but using some features of C++ like, functions inside a struct, or using namespaces, that did not sacrifice compilation and runtime speed.

We wrote this in C++ (and assembler), but used only the most obvious language features. We laid down the first code in '95 or '96:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOYps_3eM0

Yeah, gaming industry has become mature enough to build up its own inertia so it will take some time for new technologies to take off. C# has become a mainstream gamedev language thanks to Unity, but this also took more than a decade.

Comparing the time it takes for a prog language to spread from the 80s to today is a bad vantage point. Stuff took much longer to bake back then -- but even so the point is moot, as other commentors pointed out, it took off roughly the same amount of time between 2015 and today.

The concept of AAA games didn't even exist back in 1985, very few people were developing games at that era, and even fewer were writing "complex" games that would need C++.

The SNES came on 1990 and even then it had it's own architecture and most games were written in pure assembly. The PlayStation had a MIPS CPU and was one of the first to popularize 3D graphics, the biggest complexity leap.

I believe your are seeing causation were only correlation should be given. C++ and more complex OOP languages just joined the scene when the games themselves became complex, because of hardware and market natural evolution

Many tried c++ in early 90s, but wasnt it too slow/memory intensive? You had to implement lots of inline c/assembly to have a bit of performance. Nowadays everything is heavily optimized, but back then not.

Seems like a few contradictory ideas here. Rust is supposed to be a better safer C/C++.

Then lot of comments here that games are best done in C++.

So why can't Rust be used for games?

What is really missing beyond an improved ecosystem of tools. All also built on Rust.