I'm not sure why the choice was made to use a GC in Unreal. Unreal also has Smart Pointers (Weak/Shared/Unique), in addition to the GC. But the main engine framework has a GC built into it. I imagine because the engine targets less technical designers, it is very high level, and GC is very forgiving of things like circular references and all that. In the scripting language (blueprint) you can't really step on your toes like you can with the GC in C++. Hence this video :) I'm not necessarily switching to Unreal from using my own engine, I still love writing raw c++ and all that (Been planning on doing a new engine with vulkan/ecs). As for why this video series, at my job we use Unreal. Wanted to share some C++ learnings I had in dealing with it, since it is highly customized c++. Also since tutorials online can be hit or miss and often don't know the tools/techniques used in game industry. Don't get me wrong, there are some really good tutorials out there, but even some of those not set up to debug properly. Which maybe isn't necessary a single person is writing all the code, but being able to drop a breakpoint and actually navigate code, when you didn't write the code, is very useful IMO. And by default visual studio set up falls on its face because it gets so confused by all of Unreal's macros and custom build steps and all that. I should probably make a video on the unreal header tool and how it injects generated code in the c++ complication process to add things like reflection and GC to c++.
