It's still strange to see this contrast between game dev doing magic for small salaries versus big corps paying huge lumps of money for CRUD++ (sorry for being exaggerating here).
It's also cultural.. when everybody in the room thinks a REST api is state of the art, you'll have a hard time selling them more R&D.
A game dev I know went to work for Google on Android. What he found was a team full of people who had given up on gdb back in uni, had worked for Google their entire career, printf debugged all day every day, took forever to fix anything, and everyone was fine with that because that’s all they’d ever known.
It was a shock because in gamedev debuggers are a Big Deal. The vast majority of AAA gamedev happens in Visual Studio’s debugger or some alternative that is at least as capable.
Interesting. And scary.. and depressing (about Google). Gamedev has always had a special relationship with ergonomics (dev ux, dx) I assume (due to the interactive nature of their product)... Reminds me of Naughty Dog developing a whole lisp DSL to be able to try different game designs on the fly on PS1.
That said gdb and similar debuggers are still too limited IMO, there's so much we could add on top. Well maybe I'm not aware of improved variants.
> Naughty Dog developing a whole lisp DSL to be able to try different game designs on the fly on PS1
The DSL was called Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
> It supports a long term compiling listener session which gives the compiler knowledge about the state of the compiled and thus running program, including the symbol table. This, in addition to dynamic linking, allows a function to be edited, recompiled, uploaded, and inserted into a running game without having to restart.
> Naughty Dog Software used a Common Lisp DSL to write the Jak and Dexter series of games for the Play Station.
> Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, says the unique capabilities of Lisp enabled fast development and execution of character and object control – something that was needed to fully realize the numerous 3D creatures and devices which interact with the player in real-time (60 frames per second).
> “Lisp was just the best solution for this job,” comments Gavin. “With leading edge game systems like ours, you have to deal with complicated behaviors and real-time action. Languages like C are very poor with temporal constructs. C is just very awkward for a project like this. Lisp, on the other hand, is ideal.”
> As Gavin explains, “With Lisp, one can rapidly develop meta constructs for behaviors and combine them in new ways. In addition, Lisp allows the redefinition of the language to easily add new constructs; particularly those needed to deal with time-based behaviors and layering of actions. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing inherently slow about Lisp. It is easy to construct a simple dialect which is just as efficient as C, but retains the dynamic and consistent qualities that make Lisp a much more effective expression of one’s programming intentions.”
> But the craziest thing I did was create a new programming language – with Lisp syntax – for coding all of the gameplay. It had all sorts of built in state machine support (very useful with game objects), powerful macros, dynamic loading etc. It was also highly irregular and idiosyncratic, and in true Naughty Dog fashion “powerful but complicated.”
As for how he works these days, I see in the About page:
> Briefly in 2008, and then full time from the second half of 2009 on, Andy has been concentrating on novel writing.
The GDB feature set has been largely unchanged since the 80s and even then mostly just parroted the design of other CLI debuggers from the 70s. Of course it is limited, you are talking about technology that was not even cutting edge nearly half a century ago.
To be fair, the core components of a low level debug agent are still largely the same, so it is not like the technology is bad per se. It is just that it only constitutes table stakes, a bare minimum foundation, these days. Even looking at 20 year old technology like time travel debugging that allows you to time travel execution back and forth gives a far better idea of what people are missing by using primitive tools.
I'm a bit shocked that Google is so full of them. That said the FP link seems weak, in theory (sic) functional programming will make you think about domains beforehand so the debugging game changes. But if it's mild FP over brittle ecmascript 5 libs... then it's another story.
It's also cultural.. when everybody in the room thinks a REST api is state of the art, you'll have a hard time selling them more R&D.