Historically, Assembly has been the democoders language of choice, for its superior speed (if used properly ofcourse) and total control over what the hardware does exactly. In the oldschool days using anything else was generally considered 'lame' and usually with reason; non-asm demos were inferior.
Though with the coming of multi-gigaherz CPUs and 3d accelerated VGA cards the speed factor becomes less pressing, and the coming of Windows has made total control over the hardware an illusion aswell.
So right now its possible to make impressive demos in C++ or Delphi aswell, the former seeming to be more common. I bet most good democoders still use assembly for cpu-critical parts though, theres no beating it for speed. But higher level compilers can save you a lot of work, especially for windows.
That was the long version :) In short, C++ with either inline or linked assembly parts is the most suitable and common currently.
it is not only the CPU speed that makes c++ so attractive, but also the Objet-Oriented design of program-structure (e.g. for a 3d engine) and the developer environment (e.g. .NET Studio) that supports object oriented design. and also not to forget about the compilers which can usually optimise the inner loops of complex algorithms (or at least those that use more variables than the cpu has registers) pretty well.
and since pixelshaders have entered the picture, optimising inner loops with (inline) assembler rather than c++ has become obsoleete: it is better (and i bet nearly always possible) to code 2d effects as pixelshaders, e.g. with HLSL.
so, my current choice (and advice) for coding is: C++ (in combination with DirectX and HLSL).
Phalanger: with the wierd scheduling-rules of p4 and the damn good compilers these days, optimizing innerloops in assembly is simply just a damn waste of time.
Vilcan: C++ by far.
[Post edited by kusma on Monday 21 March 2005 - 14:18]
