Lately I seem to refer to myself a lot as “old-school” when it comes to talking about tech. I don’t feel too old-school in the game industry, but when it comes to web tech I definitely am. I can rock some PHP and MySQL, sure, but when it comes to web apps what I really want to use is C++. Because it’s the language I know best.
At Casual Connect this week I went out on a limb and asserted that C++ would be the next great language for the web. And why not? There are so many people out there who know C++, and have code they’ve written in it over the years – why shouldn’t these folks be able to leverage their expertise? I don’t think HTML5, Flash or Java are going anywhere, but enabling C++ on the web is a really interesting thing.
Of course, we’re going down that road with the development of Native Client for Chrome. The idea is that you recompile your code using a GCC-based compiler that produced sanitized executables, and then the code runs in a multi-layer sandbox that provides high performance and access to hardware acceleration through libraries like OpenGL ES 2.0. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities… and I’m looking forward to hooking it into all sorts of “new-school” JavaScript APIs to take advantage of what the web has to offer.
I think the combination may be hard to beat – hardware acceleration and access to web APIs. FTW!
Now I better get back to work – lots to do. 🙂