Thread: DriectX SDK or XNA ?

In other words, it's just a library where more thought and easiness of use has been put work into. They chose to put that work in C# rather than C++...

C# is just easier to learn than C++. It doesn't have many of the complex parts of C++, it has garbage collection, it is loaded with syntactic sugar.
This makes it the ideal target for their ease-of-use library, because the users of C++ (in their view) are the game companies, which wouldn't accept the abstraction penalty of such a library anyway, and thus wouldn't use it.

Originally Posted by Elysia

C# can never beat C++ in speed and will never get on equal footing with optimized code. My point was that C# is unsuitable for games (Because it's too darn slow! Microsoft, are you blind?!), and I stand by that.

The performance difference is actually pretty small, a few percent at most, especially since CPU is becoming less and less of the performance bottleneck, and from the GPU's point of view, it's running the same HLSL either way. Generally, CPU is no longer the limiting factor to your game's performance, and thus CPU efficiency is less important.

And, if your game actually needs many of the advanced memory management features of C# -- such as being able to dynamically relocate objects in memory to avoid memory fragmentation, garbage collection, etc. -- the difference in performance becomes even smaller. And as there are games that take 1.5 GB+ of memory, and are designed for Win32 (with only 2 GB available virtual address space for each application), memory fragmentation rears its ugly head more and more.