Our technical lead insisted on pure C++ for our mobile brawler, arguing that native performance was non-negotiable. We built everything from scratch: rendering, physics, audio, networking.
Memory Management Nightmare
Three developers spent four months tracking down crashes caused by improper memory cleanup across iOS and Android. We had no automatic reference counting, no garbage collection safety nets. Every pointer required manual verification. A hybrid approach using C++ only for physics and rendering would have saved us countless debugging hours while maintaining the performance we needed.
Tooling Gaps We Ignored
C++ offered no built-in solutions for in-app purchases, push notifications, or social integration. We wrote JNI bridges for Android and Objective-C++ wrappers for iOS. Each platform update broke our custom code. Studios using C# or Kotlin handled these features through standard libraries in days, not weeks.
The Reality Check
Competitor games using Unity with selective C++ plugins launched four months before us. Their frame rates matched ours. Players never noticed the difference. We sacrificed development speed for theoretical performance gains that provided zero competitive advantage in the actual market.