On 2012-11-20 01:45, Manu wrote:
On 19 November 2012 22:28, Rob T <r...@ucora.com <mailto:r...@ucora.com>> wrote:On Monday, 19 November 2012 at 19:14:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote: I'd never even _heard_ of half types before this discussion came up. But then again, the same goes for SIMD. And IIRC, there was some sort of function attribute relating to pointers and registers that you or some other gaming person was insisting on a while back, and I'd never heard of it existing in C++ either (as an extension or otherwise). You clearly program in a very different world than I do. I care about high performance in what I do but nothing on _that_ level. I suspect that this is another one of those things that certain folks would really like to have, and most of the rest of us don't have any real interest in and often know nothing about in the first place. I don't know that I really care whether it's added to the language though. I'll leave that sort of decision up to Walter. If anything, I just find it interesting how many low level things folks like you keep coming up with as must-haves or very strong wants that I've never even heard of and will almost certainly never care about aside perhaps from how having them in D might help D catch on. - Jonathan M Davis Anyone interested in the low precision float types, and what they are good for, can start here http://www.opengl.org/wiki/__Small_Float_Formats <http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Small_Float_Formats> I did not read through all of this thread, but my guess is that the people making the request for half float are mostly into game development and image processing. When I first started investigating D as a potential C++ replacement, I noted that a lot of the "visible" development (what I could see being publicized) was game development, so it seemed that for some reason a lot of the D users were also game developers, so there's perhaps something about D that they find attractive. I've said it before, but I think D has MASSIVE potential in gaming. We are an industry crying our for salvation from C++, but there's no possibility to compromise on the level of access it provides us to the hardware we work with. D is the only language I know of that seriously threatens to offer modern programming constructs, while still providing a syntax and compiler technology that I can easily understand in terms of code generation and can hit the metal when I need to. Additionally, most games programmers have very long-term relationships with C++ almost exclusively, so despite hating it, moving to something utterly different like rust or whatever cool thing comes along will just never fly. You'll never convince a team of 10-30 programmers to agree on such a change all at once, and re-training staff in something so foreign would never be economical. D is again particularly interesting here because it's enough like C++ and C# that programmers feel immediately comfortable and somewhat liberated, but not threatened. Also, in a lot of cases, the changes to D are relatively intuitive. The things you expect should work, often just do... but there are still lots of rough edges too. Gaming is a very demanding and progressive field of software, but also very backwards at the same time. It's a sort of unity between many disciplines, and it all comes together under a performance critical and usually embedded umbrella, in a highly competitive and fickle industry. You can't tell the customer to upgrade their hardware when it needs to run on a console with an ~8 year lifecycle. As a (tech/engine) programmer, if you don't scrutinise the code generation, calling conventions, memory access patterns, data layout and sizes, the competition will, and their product will appear superior. Towards the end of that 8 year cycle, programmers are REALLY squeezing these machines. If the language doesn't support that, then you can't compete anymore, hence we remain stuck on C++ (and there are many instances where the industry is reverting to C because C++ is a bloaty pig). Why game devs are interested so much in D is interesting considering the GC is noted to be a problem for game devs. The work of H. S. Teoh comes to mind with his work on a game engine, that pushed the limits of the GC and std lib. I'll admit this is my biggest fear hands down! That said, D is the only GC based language I know if where the GC is relatively optional. This allows us to hedge our bets, and ease in to it slowly as we gain confidence and understanding of how it behaves. I don't yet have much confidence in the GC, and generally avoid using it. I only use it for short term allocations, or non-critical-loop work which often only survive for the scope of the function.
Someone has created GC free versions of Phobos and druntime: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20#more-20 Was posted here: http://forum.dlang.org/thread/k27bh7$t7f$1...@digitalmars.com -- /Jacob Carlborg
