My Introduction
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Nicholas Frechette
May 31, 2011, 11:30:17 AM5/31/11
to Erlang Montreal
Hey guys, good to see erlang activity in Quebec.
I'm based in Montreal and use erlang for my projects at home (currency
trading platform) for my backends. Up and running for 1.5 years now,
no downtime, all smiles :)
I'd love to use it at work but there is no place for erlang in video
games (outside of tools) sadly. At least for now.
Cheers,
Nicholas
I'm based in Montreal and use erlang for my projects at home (currency
trading platform) for my backends. Up and running for 1.5 years now,
no downtime, all smiles :)
I'd love to use it at work but there is no place for erlang in video
games (outside of tools) sadly. At least for now.
Cheers,
Nicholas
Ahmed Al-Saadi
Jun 13, 2011, 2:13:08 AM6/13/11
to erlang-...@googlegroups.com
What do you use (language, platform) for game development, Nicholas?
It seems that some people are using Erlang as a backend for online
games. See the this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-programming/browse_thread/thread/66531024076576c7/47637c28523bb5d6
-signed(ahmed).
Nicholas Frechette
Jun 13, 2011, 10:34:37 AM6/13/11
to erlang-...@googlegroups.com
Almost exclusively C/C++ with some assembly.
I have heard of some online games using erlang for their backend but nothing on a very large scale or nothing for high paced gameplay (ie: fps)
My personal experience with erlang is that it is great for software that isn't too performance hungry or where latency shouldn't be as small as possible. Also, for a lot of backend code, you'll have to write significant portions in C++ linked in drivers to get access to intrinsics (SIMD math) which is required for a good portion of the game code: some AI, spatial queries, animation, rendering, physics, etc. Of course all of this can be written in pure erlang however past a certain point, it becomes very hard to optimize in erlang since it isn't immediately obvious how the beam makes uses of the I/D Cache and other minor annoyances. It is also too painful to ignore SIMD optimizations for a large category of critical code like physics.
I could easily see some portions written in erlang (the DB side, the shard management, a lot of code/data pipeline applications, etc.) but for the forseeable future, high performance game runtimes will continue to stick with C++. No way you can make a AAA title at 60fps on a console with erlang, sorry :) Also most game companies hire C++ programmers, most of which have never programmed extensively in a functionnal programming language. In those companies, not only is there nobody to champion the idea of using erlang for a specific portion, but there also is nobody to maintain it after it is written (at least not without serious ramping up time).
Keep in mind that for a number of online games (mmo among others), code that you would think can safely only run on the client side only must often be run on the server side for all kinds of reasons (although potentially with a much lower level of detail) such as animation (sometimes twice in a frame), physics, AI, etc.
Cheers,
Nicholas
I have heard of some online games using erlang for their backend but nothing on a very large scale or nothing for high paced gameplay (ie: fps)
My personal experience with erlang is that it is great for software that isn't too performance hungry or where latency shouldn't be as small as possible. Also, for a lot of backend code, you'll have to write significant portions in C++ linked in drivers to get access to intrinsics (SIMD math) which is required for a good portion of the game code: some AI, spatial queries, animation, rendering, physics, etc. Of course all of this can be written in pure erlang however past a certain point, it becomes very hard to optimize in erlang since it isn't immediately obvious how the beam makes uses of the I/D Cache and other minor annoyances. It is also too painful to ignore SIMD optimizations for a large category of critical code like physics.
I could easily see some portions written in erlang (the DB side, the shard management, a lot of code/data pipeline applications, etc.) but for the forseeable future, high performance game runtimes will continue to stick with C++. No way you can make a AAA title at 60fps on a console with erlang, sorry :) Also most game companies hire C++ programmers, most of which have never programmed extensively in a functionnal programming language. In those companies, not only is there nobody to champion the idea of using erlang for a specific portion, but there also is nobody to maintain it after it is written (at least not without serious ramping up time).
Keep in mind that for a number of online games (mmo among others), code that you would think can safely only run on the client side only must often be run on the server side for all kinds of reasons (although potentially with a much lower level of detail) such as animation (sometimes twice in a frame), physics, AI, etc.
Cheers,
Nicholas
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