Am 23.05.2013 20:13, schrieb Brad Anderson:
While there hasn't been anything official, I think it's a safe bet to
say that D is being used for a major title, Remedy's Quantum Break,
featured prominently during the announcement of Xbox One. Quantum Break
doesn't come out until 2014 so the timeline seems about right (Remedy
doesn't appear to work on more than one game at a time from what I can
tell).
That's pretty huge news.
Now I'm wondering what can be done to foster this newly acquired
credibility in games. By far the biggest issue I hear about when it
comes to people working on games in D is the garbage collector. You can
work around the GC without too much difficulty as Manu's experience
shared in his DConf talk shows but a lot of people new to D don't know
how to do that. We could also use some tools and guides to help people
identify and avoid GC use when necessary.
@nogc comes to mind (I believe Andrei mentioned it during one of the
talks released). [1][2]
Johannes Pfau's work in progress -vgc command line option [3] would be
another great tool that would help people identify GC allocations. This
or something similar could also be used to document throughout phobos
when GC allocations can happen (and help eliminate it where it makes
sense to).
There was a lot of interesting stuff in Benjamin Thaut's article about
GC versus manual memory management in a game [4] and the discussion
about it on the forums [5]. A lot of this collective knowledge built up
on manual memory management techniques specific to D should probably be
formalized and added to the official documentation. There is a Memory
Management [6] page in the documentation but it appears to be rather
dated at this point and not particularly applicable to modern D2 (no
mention of emplace or scoped and it talks about using delete and scope
classes).
Game development is one place D can really get a foothold but all too
often the GC is held over D's head because people taking their first
look at D don't know how to avoid using it and often don't realize you
can avoid using it entirely. This is easily the most common issue raised
by newcomers to D with a C or C++ background that I see in the #d IRC
channel (many of which are interested in game dev but concerned the GC
will kill their game's performance).
1: http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5219
2: http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP18
3: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1886
4: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20#more-20
5: http://forum.dlang.org/post/k27bh7$t7f$1...@digitalmars.com
6: http://dlang.org/memory.html
Besides my studies I'm working at havok and the biggest problems most
likely would be (in order of importance)
- Compiler / druntime for all 9 plattforms we have to support simply do
not exist
- Full Visual Studio integration needed. Inclusive a really good code
completion and a very nice debugging experience for all plattforms.
VisualD is quite nice and debugging using the visual studio debugger
works quite well but its a real pita that you have to patch dmd and
compile it from source so you can debug in x64 on windows.
- SIMD: core.simd is just not there yet. The last time I looked really
basic stuff like unaligned loads where missing.
- The GC. A no go, a GC free version of the runtime (non leaking) should
be provided.
- Better windows support. All of the developement we do happens on
windows and most of D's community does not care about windows support.
I'm curious how long it will take until D will get propper DLL support.
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut
