Anyway to make D attractive to game development?
1. VisualD needs to be on par with Visual Assist
2. D needs to figure out what the hell it is doing with
GC/RC/Memory
3. Target all common platforms
4. Allow for C++ and D to call each other without requiring a C
interop layer.(not going to happen but would help immensely)
3. should be probably done with a backend that compiles to C,
it's not the default backend anybody would ever use but it would
give studios the peace of mind of not losing investment when
moving to a new platform. We deal with new, proprietary platforms
all the time and no other backend will ever be ported in time to
ship a title on a "nextgen" console otherwise.
1. and 4. are needed if you want a general C++ replacement, I
agree but if instead of a being a general C++ replacement it
started to conquer a niche where it can prove to be incredibly
useful, we could tolerate even 2., that's what I tried to say in
the blog post, we use Lua, Lua has horrible GC (well, not really
GC is a problem, but that everything needs allocations) that
requires workarounds to be in a shippable state, yet we do use
Lua a lot across the industry. Because it's the best we can find
for livecoding. Another example could be ISPC, it's serves a
niche but it's really useful in that one and we might consider
integrating it for tight numerical kernels, it's a small section
of code where a new language could start insinuating itself...
