Structured Synchronous Reactive Programming for Game Development Case Study: On Rewriting Pingus from C plus plus to CEU

We present a qualitative case study of rewriting the video game Pingus from C++ to the structured synchronous reactive language CEU. CEU supports reactive control-flow primitives that eliminate callbacks and let programmers write code in direct and sequential style. Structured reactivity helps describing complex control-flow relationships in the game logic more concisely. We show gains in productivity for four behaviors in Pingus through a qualitative analysis of the proposed implementations in CEU in comparison to the originals in C++. We also categorize the behaviors in recurrent control-flow patterns that likely apply to most games.