Amazon launches AWS C++ SDK designed for game developers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon-owned public cloud that companies can use to build and run applications, announced today the availability of an open-source software-development kit (SDK) for the popular object-oriented programming language C++.

The new SDK is one of several AWS has made available to developers to help them build applications on that cloud. AWS has previously released SDKs for Google-led Go, Microsoft’s .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala.

“This SDK has been specifically designed with game developers in mind, but we have also worked hard to maintain an interface that will work for systems engineering tasks, as well as other projects that simply need the efficiency of native code,” Amazon software development engineer Jonathan Henson wrote in a blog post on the news.

AWS has already built up quite a following among developers. In the realm of gaming in particular, it’s gotten adoption from Ubisoft, Supercell, and Naughty Dogs, among others. This new tooling merely makes it easier for more developers and game studios to start building code with hooks into AWS infrastructure. That’s important as AWS faces competition in the public cloud from Microsoft, Google, IBM, VMware, and other companies.

It’s surprising that it took this long for AWS to ship a C++ SDK, though. C++, a descendent of C that first appeared in the late 1970s, is very widely used by programmers. It was the seventh most popular technology in Stack Overflow’s 2015 developer survey. it’s also the seventh most popular language on GitHub. Scala, by contrast, didn’t make the top 10 on either list. Go figure.

The C++ SDK for AWS is available now on GitHub here.