While it might feel unfair, I wasn't attacking anyone on purpose, it is based on experience, from my demoscene days, to the friends I got to meet in the industry, to my former past as IGDA member, and the ways I have kept in touch with the industry, even though I have decided that the boring corporate world with graphics programming as hobby, was something I rather spend my time on than the typical studio life.
While the demands of gaming industry have always driven the hardware evolution on mainstream computing, most studios only move to newer programing languages when the platform owners force them to do so.
The gaming industry is not known for being early adopters of new software stacks, and many studios would to this day actually use pure C instead of C++ if the console vendors would give them C based SDKs.
> While the demands of gaming industry have always driven the hardware evolution on mainstream computing, most studios only move to newer programing languages when the platform owners force them to do so.
My point is that it isn't a question of new vs old. It's a question of fast vs slow. There was a reluctance to adopt e.g. Pascal because the popular implementations favored convenience of implementation (UCSD Pascal, which generated code for a virtual machine) or speed of compilation (Turbo Pascal, a single pass compiler) over the quality of the generated code. For long, it was the case that C compilers generated code that couldn't nearly measure up with hand-written assembly.
I've seen plenty of old games and demos written in C and Pascal. Almost always using these languages as organization frameworks for executing snippets of in-line assembly where speed actually mattered.
So what are the alternatives to C++ today? A lot of game developers use Unity and write code in C#. Unity itself is of course written almost entirely in C++. Rust? Well, if you can figure out exactly when memory is freed, which Rust can make a bit of a puzzle. Zig seems like it could be a nice contender, at some point in the future. Swift? If you can accept the cost of reference counting.
All these are great options IMO, just perhaps not for the low-level work that goes on at the big high tech game studios. The closest thing to a contender is maybe Rust. The game industry's reluctance to adopt Rust is hardly unique to them.
I know several studios local to Vancouver that are making heavy use of Go, Swift or Rust. And of course, a few that are deep into HTML5. There are games being shipped written in mruby.
I'm not in agreement with your assessment that the industry is conservative; it is largely responsible for pushing graphics into programmable pipelines, for instance, and the vendor-preffered language lock-in for consoles hasn't really been a factor since the Indie revolution took the industry by storm.
I don't take indies into consideration on my remark, consoles and mobile OS is where the money is, and none of those languages have a place there currently, with exception of Swift on iOS.
I know for a fact that teams at EA are using such tech, as are teams at Microsoft and others.
Also, thumbing your nose at Indie games is odd, considering the sales they've enjoyed and the extent to which the industry has adjusted to adapt to their surge in popularity.
I can't imagine Nintendo in the 90s treating indie devs the way it treats them today.
Swift, Kotlin, Objective-C, Java are unavoidable when doing iOS and Android development, the OS features that are exposed to C and C++ aren'tt enough for doing a game.
While the demands of gaming industry have always driven the hardware evolution on mainstream computing, most studios only move to newer programing languages when the platform owners force them to do so.
The gaming industry is not known for being early adopters of new software stacks, and many studios would to this day actually use pure C instead of C++ if the console vendors would give them C based SDKs.