Game Development by Sean

C++ Paper N4456 - Survey of C++ Problems for Game Development

Table of Contents

N4456 - “Towards improved support for games, graphics, real-time, low latency, embedded systems” (Michael Wong, Sean Middleditch, Nicolas Guillemot)

Some history on the paper:

Michael Wong (representative of the Canadian National Body on the committee) was taking input from various game developers back at CppCon to let us air our complaints. I then put together an unofficial mailing list for a handful of us to discuss out plans for a proper paper. The original efforts centered around analyzing the old EASTL paper, which we got through most of, but still need public benchmarks. Then Work™ happened, I got busy, and didn’t follow through; thankfully Michael, Nicholas, and several others took up the mantle and got this initial paper put together.

The primary focus of the paper is mostly to raise awareness in the committee and to possibly help spark the formation of a proper sub-group. Such an SG would investigate these and related issues and try to get more involvement from game companies in the committee. We are some of the biggest and most important users of the language, yet we have near no representation on the committee!

As they say, the first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there even is a problem.

There’s talk of possibly combining with the real-time and embedded development sub-group in the works, since our needs are pretty similar. If all goes well, we might see a new said group formed to help shepherd related papers and foster better community interaction.

Past this paper, we need to start writing up papers for real solutions. There are a handful of planned papers in the works, but plenty of room for new contributors to step up and help make a difference.

You can get involved with the committee at isocpp.org. The site includes public forums frequented by a number of committee members and has information on how to submit a paper for the committee to review.