>If GC is inherently incompatible with C++ then someone wants to
>tell the C++ standards board before they add one for 2009.
the reason it is incompatible is that everyone is that there is no shared way of doing it. if the C++ board finally decides it then there is hope that GC actually will become useful. that said, it's hard/impossible for a GC to do a good without more analysis of the code which isn't currently done.
>Debugging is almost non-existent if you follow a test first
yes, the best way to remove bugs is to not add them in first place. nothing new. bugs are still unavoidable though. I guess here we can kick C/C++ in yet another way: there are no good interpreters and few statistical test tools, making unit testing more time consuming.
>The rest of the game will be a huge selection of scripts and data
>that apply on top of the engine.
...or some kind of embedded language, depending on how much scripting is needed/cost of making scripting language.
>Out of interest, what do you suggest as a more productive
>language? Usually I find productivity is effected far more by things
one language for each problem, or maybe even a mixture (some languages mix better than other though, this is a sad situation). I use mostly Java, C, C++ and Haskell, together special purpose languages like Erlang and Matlab. I hate all of them
there is especially room for an eager imperative language that is guaranteed fast but doesn't give you cobol fingers.
>games programming. Fiddly pointer arithmetic is far more useful in
>this domain than things like closures and lambda's. Performance
>dominates.
lambdas and closures doesn't offer your language something you cannot already do with tons of interfaces and classes (or blatant replication of code). but it saves a lot of time and hence makes you more productive. pointers are rather more comparable to lazyness as a feature, but that on the other hand, has little use in games programming. luckily you don't need lazyness for higher order function etc (and indeed Java 7 will have something similar, and C# also has something like it)