Why C?!

I started working on a game about 5 years ago. At the time it was supposed to be a retro Cannon Fodder clone for PC and retro platforms. For the sake of compatibility with retro computers, I chose C and SDL1 to build the game. You can get C for just about any computer, and SDL1 too. I planned to make this game work on RISC OS, Amiga and a couple of other machines. Very early versions did indeed run on RISC OS on my Raspberry Pi 4.

It even ran on Haiku:

As time went on I decided I wanted to make the game bigger, my brother practically demanded I used a later version of SDL, and that meant leaving the retros behind, but the choice of C remains.

Writing a 100,000+ line game in C has been great though; I’ve never regretted the choice. Using a more modern language like Rust, or perhaps C++ or C#, would have made some things easier, but at the same time C’s primitive nature hasn’t caused me any real problems at all. It still feels like an entirely usable language in 2026.

And if an Amiga comes along with full SDL2 support and enough RAM, maybe I’ll get my retro port after all.