I have used pointers for years and have never had any real issues. Pointers are only bad in the hands of bad programmers( in the case they shouldn't be programming in the first place )
"They only do bad things if written badly. Which is easy to do but shouldn't we bear that responsibility?" Agreed.
Problem is... most people who mapmake are NOT programmers. And most of the point of the GUI editor in the first place is so that you have to know as little as code as possible (same with data editor). There is a reason managed languages were created and are fairly popular. Pointers are purely for performance reasons (less memory usage, faster execution, smaller code), but for a large number of applications, performance is last on the list. Things like modularity, readability, maintainability are all just as important. Few will care about good performance if the cost to change the code is significant, and many have run into that issue.
For that reason, along with security, pointers are basically unnecessary in SC2. From what I've seen, most maps would benefit from basic code refactors, and data abstraction (placing stuff in User Types, rethinking algorithms, better modularity),
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Problem is... most people who mapmake are NOT programmers. And most of the point of the GUI editor in the first place is so that you have to know as little as code as possible (same with data editor). There is a reason managed languages were created and are fairly popular. Pointers are purely for performance reasons (less memory usage, faster execution, smaller code), but for a large number of applications, performance is last on the list. Things like modularity, readability, maintainability are all just as important. Few will care about good performance if the cost to change the code is significant, and many have run into that issue.
For that reason, along with security, pointers are basically unnecessary in SC2. From what I've seen, most maps would benefit from basic code refactors, and data abstraction (placing stuff in User Types, rethinking algorithms, better modularity),