Bullet Physics in D

[BigSandwich]

On Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 20:26:37 UTC, BLM768 wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out the allocation model that the port 
> should use. Bullet normally provides its own allocators for 
> efficiency, but I've been trying to integrate the port with the 
> GC where it's practical. Does anyone have suggestions on the 
> best approach?
> I'm not too familiar with Bullet's allocation system, so I 
> should probably research that...

I've used Bullet in a professional capacity, and I'd hesitant to 
force the GC on your users.  I'd port their allocators and supply 
implementations that map to malloc or the GC and let users that 
have their own heap implementations map them to those.

There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) Most large game engines/simulations probably already have 
several types of custom allocators that they'd like to map bullet 
allocations to.

2) GC is not necessarily the best model for keeping track of 
physics data.  Usually, physics objects are tied to their game 
entity counterparts and should be cleaned up as soon as those go 
away.  This ownership is mostly unambiguous, so its not much of a 
burden to remember to clean up the physics objects. I used ref 
counting when I set up my company's implementation but even that 
is probably not necessary.