[capl]

I am a fan of Go due to the focus on simplicity in the language... but why Go for game dev? The purpose of the language was to tackle backend services previously written in C++ focusing on junior developers, not game dev.

It's not really a popular tool for the job: Python, which is a simpler language, has a much larger community of gamedev noobs. Or maybe better yet: start with Godot and GDScript

[susam]

> ... but why Go for game dev? The purpose of the language was to tackle backend services previously written in C++ focusing on junior developers, not game dev.

I'd say using any language for game development should be embraced, not discouraged.

Imagine if William Crowther had thought, "Why Fortran for game development? The purpose of the language is to tackle scientific computing." Thankfully, he did not think like that.

All Crowther had with him was PDP-10, Fortran, a teletype that probably looked like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASR-33_at_CHM.agr.jpg, some sheets of paper, and a sense of fun! Without being bothered about what these tools were really meant for, he went ahead and developed Colossal Cave Adventure thereby introducing the genre of text-based adventure games into the field of computing. A player had to type their input into the teletypewriter and wait for the computer to print the output on, well, physical paper! Still it was fun. It is nice to have fun and write games with whatever technology we have got.

[llm_nerd]

Using the origin-story* of a language to argue against what the language can be used for now is never a good argument.

Go is a powerful, accessible language. It yields highly optimized, tight binary output targeting a wide variety of platforms and systems. Why not Go?

Python is basically a non-starter in this space. Your other example is a scripting language inside an engine. These seem orthogonal.

* - Which is oft heavily editorialized and fictitious, such as in this case

[veqq]

> Python, which is a simpler language

This seems crazy to me. How so?

[superkuh]

If you never use anyone elses packages and only stick to vanilla python available on your system it's a great learning language. Many universities still use it to teach programming today. But this is mostly inertia...

...because python has changed in the last decade so that anything ever so slightly complex requires learning all it's dependency manager manager setups (conda, pyenv, etc) to set up an entire custom python implementation with it's own dependency manager (pip, whatever, etc) just to be able to run a single python application or use a python lib. Trying to do it with the actual python your system runs will always end in tragedy.

So yeah... Python is a simple language. But using python these days is so complex I actually chose C++ over it to avoid complexity. And that's really saying something. That said, there's no such thing as system 'go' at all so it brings in plenty of complexity too despite being 'simple' in it's own way.