My friend Adam Sawicki posted an interesting blog post recently: C++ is Good for Fast Coding with which I couldn’t disagree more. While certainly you can do fast coding in C++ (especially being an experienced developer) there is just so much more in the world.
Few examples: iteration time. With small and simple C++ codebase usage you can cut compilation, link and startup time to few seconds, and you need to switch between your game/app and IDE. With more dynamic languages you certainly can do better. Some languages like Lua (and, FWIW, Dab) allow easy hotswapping. I have a nice prototyping environment for Lua code – I have a game running on one screen, debugging info on another and the code itself (nothing fancy – Notepad++) on the third one. I trace changes in game source using WinAPI and simple Ctrl+S lets me to view my changes immediately (non-compiling code is rejected). This allows me to have like 3 iterations per second and when doing some finetuning every iteration counts. And I believe that I’d still be able to do better (like using some dedicated Lua editor). Code hotswapping in C++ is nontrivial and even with sophisticated framework with DLL swapping you probably won’t beat 0.3 IPS due to build time.
Another issue: language features. There is a lot that is easily doable with Lua and close to impossible for C++. While C++0x is picking up, most dynamic languages have had stuff like closures since always. You can have table proxies (have array of 20 enemies to update? update the array!) or functional programming stuff (map/reduce/filter etc -> beat enemies.max("x") with C++!). This do matter if your app have an expected lifespan of a mayfly.
Of course most of this stuff isn’t very helpful for large projects. With 400KLOC project, weak linking alone will make you cry and run for your life. But with 400LOC project it’s just cool. I would even love to quietly call nils like Obj-C for that matter, but I guess you shouldn’t be greedy.
If you’re experienced enough you’ll probably be able to code small project in C++ (or any other language) in few hours – not because you use C++, but because it’s a small project and you are experienced. If you weren’t, you’d probably spend 3 hours to fix linker errors alone. And don’t be afraid to try out new stuff – especially if it’s a short home project. For example, until recently I didn’t know I love Ruby as a shell scripting language – but I’ve tried it and won’t look back.
TL;DR: if you say you can code fast small game in C++, try Lua and keep it real!
iOS offers (via UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities) possibility to require specific device capabilities, like GPS or camera. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow to select devices manually. For most applications this is not a problem, but there are apps like games that require specific performance level. And performance varies on different iOS devices. So in order to exclude some devices you need to provide more device feature requirements. Similar or maybe even worse situation is on Mac App Store.
