>The use of C is almost the only choice, but I'm on the lookout for the
>next wave of languages that will be:
> 1. Native code compiled - no external runtime required.
> 2. High level language features, but not imposed on you.
Have a look at Haskell (www.haskell.org). I don't want to get into
language advocacy (you'll find enough of that elsewhere;-), so I'll just
address your points:
1. GHC compiles to native code (either via C or, increasingly, directly)
2. Higher-level language features are strongly suggested (and even higher-
level features are being worked on continuously), but not imposed - if
you want to write C-style code in Haskell, you can (just don't show it:-)
(and if you absolutely want to write the inner loop in C, Haskell has a
nice foreign function interface - it gets a lot of its libraries from
importing
the C APIs and wrapping higher-level safer interfaces on top; so you
always have the fallback of writing a few core pieces in C for speed
while writing the framework and interface code in Haskell for
expressiveness)
You also mentioned string handling, which harks back to your second
point above: a game engines involves many tasks, not all of which require
low-level bit-fiddling, so you actually need to be able to mix high- and
low-level code as appropriate. Again, Haskell allows this.
Disclaimer: Haskell is by no means perfect, and I have many, many
gripes with it and it implementations. But it is very good for increasingly
many things, and games programming might well be one of it (I'm not yet
sure about Go in particular - the performance-critical part of the code
doesn't look much nicer than it would in C at the moment). The thing I
like best is that it that it brings practitioners and researchers together in
a fairly nice community (it used to be more research-heavy, but that has
balanced over recent years).
Claus
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