How much do you think it would have cost to halve the minimum requirements for (say) Half-life 2
I think HL2 is optimized very well as it is. Most (popular) commercial games are (BTW, I'm reasonably certain that HL2 was created with C++).
spending another 6 months optimizing the game to get that kind of additional sales?
Again, assuming that it takes 6 months more to use C++ as opposed to something like C#.
so the effect of any (real or imagined) compiler optimization is trivial at best
I hardly think that's an accurate statement when disabling C++ compiler optimization on my project drops it from 250 FPS to ~20 FPS on my relatively high-end PC.
Yes the skill of a programmer (or the application of techniques like pair-programming) can compensate for a lot of accidental complexity, but it seems somewhat of a wasted effort, when the effort could be spent further improving productivity, rather than fighting complexities inherent in the language, and instead focusing on the problem that needs solving.
Ok. Maybe I'm different, but for me it's second nature to avoid these problems - in other words, there's no effort lost.
Is it? I don't know that. Logic bugs are found by writing good unit tests. Good unit tests will prevent 90% logic bugs, and 100% regression bugs. The bugs that really cause problems (with C++ programs) are rogue pointers and concurrent access to shared data, and they are almost impossible to track down.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but a "rogue pointer" seems like a very common beginners mistake in C++ (just like forgetting your semicolons, you learn to eliminate it with time).
I'm not saying that high level languages don't reduce potential bugs, I'm saying that in some (though hardly the majority of) cases, the performance loss isn't worth it.
For example, can you imagine CryEngine 2 being coded completely in Python? That just seems ridiculous to me. Yes, the coding time would probably be reduced slightly, but not only would most of your time be spend on higher level tasks (inventing rendering techniques), but as I'm sure you know the engine would run inexcusably slow.
And I'm saying it's ludicrous to claim that programmers intentionally write rubbish code! Maybe everyone I know is just a natural born programmer (which I seriously doubt)?
Who are these mystery people you are referring to?
Who are these mystery people you are referring to?
First of all, it's not me - it's the article I was explaining to you.
Secondly, I'm not saying programmers intentionally write bad code. I'm saying that it seems you claim that code optimizations are worthless and only waste your time.