Hello D community. I've been reading a lot about D lately. I have known it existed for ages, but for some reason never even took a moment to look into it. The more I looked into it, the more I realise, this is the language I want. C(/C++) has been ruined, far beyond salvation. D seems to be the reboot that it desperately needs.
Anyway, I work in the games industry, 10 years in cross platform console games at major studios. Sadly, I don't think Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google (...maybe google) will support D any time soon, but I've started some after-hours game projects to test D in a some real gamedev environments. So far I have these (critical) questions. Pointer aliasing... C implementations uses a non-standard __restrict keyword to state that a given pointer will not be aliased by any other pointer. This is critical in some pieces of code to eliminate redundant loads and stores, particularly important on RISC architectures like PPC. How does D address pointer aliasing? I can't imagine the compiler has any way to detect that pointer aliasing is not possible in certain cases, many cases are just far too complicated. Is there a keyword? Or plans? This is critical for realtime performance. C implementations often use compiler intrinsics to implement architecture provided functionality rather than inline asm, the reason is that the intrinsics allow the compiler to generate better code with knowledge of the context. Inline asm can't really be transformed appropriately to suit the context in some situations, whereas intrinsics operate differently, and run vendor specific logic to produce the code more intelligently. How does D address this? What options/possibilities are available to the language? Hooks for vendors to implement intrinsics for custom hardware? Is the D assembler a macro assembler? (ie, assigns registers automatically and manage loads/stores intelligently?) I haven't seen any non-x86 examples of the D assembler, and I think it's fair to say that x86 is the single most unnecessary architecture to write inline assembly that exists. Are there PowerPC or ARM examples anywhere? As an extension from that, why is there no hardware vector support in the language? Surely a primitive vector4 type would be a sensible thing to have? Is it possible in D currently to pass vectors to functions by value in registers? Without an intrinsic vector type, it would seem impossible. In addition to that, writing a custom Vector4 class to make use of VMX, SSE, ARM VFP, PSP VFPU, MIPS 'Vector Units', SH4 DR regs, etc, wrapping functions around inline asm blocks is always clumsy and far from optimal. The compiler (code generator and probably the optimiser) needs to understand the concepts of vectors to make good use of the hardware. How can I do this in a nice way in D? I'm long sick of writing unsightly vector classes in C++, but fortunately using vendor specific compiler intrinsics usually leads to decent code generation. I can currently imagine an equally ugly (possibly worse) hardware vector library in D, if it's even possible. But perhaps I've missed something here? I'd love to try out D on some console systems. Fortunately there are some great home-brew scenes available for a bunch of slightly older consoles; PSP/PS2 (MIPS), XBox1 (embedded x86), GameCube/Wii (PPC), Dreamcast (SH4). They all have GCC compilers maintained by the community. How difficult will it be to make GDC work with those toolchains? Sadly I know nothing about configuring GCC, so sadly I can't really help here. What about Android (or iPhone, but apple's 'x-code policy' prevents that)? I'd REALLY love to write an android project in D... the toolchain is GCC, I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to write an android app if an appropriate toolchain was available? Sorry it's a bit long, thanks for reading this far! I'm looking forward to a brighter future writing lots of D code :P But I need to know basically all these questions are addressed before I could consider it for serious commercial game dev.
