Godot Engine
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2023–2026
54:53 · 27K views · Nov 7, 2023
Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.
Frequently recommended for an experienced game-engine builder's view on why GC pauses are inevitable and why Swift's approach is appealing.
12 comments from Hacker News
Looking forward to trying this out! Another place Swift seem to be getting traction in is godot. Miguel De Icaza’s talk on the topic is highly recommended: this video
Miguels work on Swift for Godot is really inspiring. Highly recommend this video for anyone looking for more context: this video
Something like this? [LINK] > SwiftGodot can be used to either build an extension that can be added to an existing Godot project, where your code is providing services to the game engine, or it can be used as an API with SwiftGodotKit which embeds Godot as an application that is driven directly from Swift. Miguel de Icaza gave a great talk on Swift + Godot (among other things) this video
Dotnet's GC has a real latency problem. Miguel de Icaza gave a nice talk on why noticeable pauses are inevitable in a stop-the-world tracing GC, proposing Swift's reference-counting GC as the viable alternative [1]. Still, there are recent developments (Satori GC) with the promise to make the worst case far more palatable (e.g. 250ms -> 5ms) [2]. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
Yes and here is a really great talk from Miguel de Icaza about some of the history of adding C# to game engines, and why he's excited about using Swift in Godot because he claims that Swift's reference counting avoids the issues of GC pauses. this video