We recently had a discussion at our regular DevTeam meeting about exploring other possibilities for a proper development platform (and for the record, that meeting was one of the longest so far). There is a number of reasons why we think we should migrate away from a certain programming language, and base our code upon a “more supported” platform. For example, when the Chipmunk physics library updated not so long ago, several problems emerged regarding cross-compiler generated code, and ultimately broke some compatibility. Now, one would expect that since it’s C it was standard enough to “just work” every time. In reality, however, our developers have had hard time with importing and invoking (consider SSE2 and dozens of compiler flags in the equation) the 3rd party libraries. We’ve got Chipmunk working in the current build, but there’s a high probability that it’ll break again in future coming library updates. All in all, fighting these kinds of problems is indeed quite frustrating (and uncalled for), especially when debugging these things is very difficult – if not impossible.

I think that procedural coding in general, an inadequate editor, a bit too simple tools, and a somewhat limited debugger will not serve our best interests in the long run. To me personally, it’s not too encouraging to open up our current development environment and start writing productive code anymore. I’m a professional C# developer, and this procedural coding (I once preferred) is becoming a mental burden for me. It has definitely affected my motivation in a negative way. I know I said a year ago that in order to create a fast and compact compiler, a procedural approach would be ideal. But I consider pleasant and powerful tools equally important because it enhances productivity of the programmer and maintainability of the project. I’m referring to Visual Studio (which in my opinion is the best IDE out there) as well as to Intellisense, refactoring, code analysis, unit testing, and other very powerful tools provided by it. After all, I think that if the compiler required a tad more memory and it took 2 seconds longer to build a game, it wouldn’t hurt too much (in a year the computers running the compiler are probably multiple times faster anyways).

So we’ve come to a point where we’re going to port our existing code over to C++ and C#. This will make a whole lot of new possibilities available to us: We can now harness the power of modern development environments, get more productive, and we no longer have to worry about the import files. We can trust that the generated ASM is correct and that using external libraries won’t conflict (that much, at least). There are pros and cons in object oriented design, but overall I’m confident that the marginal speed gain provided by procedural coding style isn’t going to outweigh anything. One of the most important things is that the developers are happy and get to work on something they enjoy.

The Cool VES game engine is going to be re-written in C++. This still enables us to inject ASM to where speed is critical. We’re also experimenting with a new multimedia library that ought to ease our job when implementing certain command sets in the future. We also continue developing Cool VES for both Windows and Linux.

I also mentioned C#. That’s for the CoolBasic Classic compiler! Now, this is quite interesting because there has been one project (that has nothing to do with us) I’m aware of, that attempted to write a compiler in C# about a year ago. It didn’t turn out that well, and currently the project in question is apparently frozen. One would think that this should be considered a warning example, but yet I’m willing to try doing the same thing because I really think it’s possible and quite doable. Yes, there are some serious challenges, and the architecture plays an exceptionally big role here. C# makes it possible to create a very high-level and sophisticated core for the compiler, and I’m very excited about it. Only a day after the meeting, I already had an initial architecture plan and a Visual Studio solution in place. Given that procedural model is seriously impacting my motivation, I actually believe I’ll get the job done faster now that I have good tools – even when it means I basically have to start over.

Many people associate C# to the Windows operating system. While it is true that C# is largely used to write software for the Microsoft .NET Framework, not everyone is aware that you can target programs written in C# to other platforms as well, like Linux. Just as Cool VES is intended to have both Windows and Linux versions, CoolBasic Classic compiler should also be available on Linux. I’ll be using Mono for that, but more information about that will be published at a later time.

If this becomes an epic fail, I can always revert back to the old compiler, although I highly doubt that. “I want to believe” 🙂 . In fact, I should have known better when I made the decision of the development environment almost a year ago. I hope I get it right this time…

TLDR; We decided to start using more powerful development tools, and we’re all now more productive and happy.