I have a plan.. I really DO

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Friday, 6 July 2018 at 17:43:29 UTC, JN wrote:
> On Friday, 6 July 2018 at 17:26:26 UTC, wjoe wrote:
>> On Friday, 6 July 2018 at 15:53:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>> With D, ANY forgotten allocation during the game loop (and I 
>>> really mean even JUST ONE hidden allocation somewhere in the 
>>> whole game or engine), may cause the game to regularly freeze 
>>> at the wrong time, because of an unwanted GC. Hence the 
>>> phobia.
>>
>> You make it sound like a C++ game codes, debugs, profiles and 
>> optimizes itself.
>> And like there are no gotchas with C++.
>>
>>> Anyway, I know I'm on a D forum here, so "those who don't 
>>> want to understand won't, and those who want will", to 
>>> paraphrase a former poster here.
>>
>> Well, it appears that you don't.
>>
>> And since you point out the D forum folks, I know game 
>> developers are a very special lot, too, with ther mantra like 
>> repetition of GC is the devil, acting like it's 1985 and the 
>> need to count clock cycles and top-of-the-food-chain 
>> I-never-make-mistakes arrogance like nobody else knows how to 
>> write fast code, yet most games of those clever guys are bug 
>> ridden pieces of poor quality even years after release, 
>> including top AAA titles *cough* TES. Despite - or more likely 
>> because - being made in C++.
>>
>> Maybe performance aware game developers would do well to also 
>> adopt the idea of code quality and D offers a lot in that 
>> regard. Plus C++ish performance on top of that.
>
> Yeah. There are plenty of games done in GC languages. C++ folks 
> want to use C++. The ones that wanted to switched, switched 
> already. Even if nogc gets more mature, they will find another 
> excuse. Probably something like "yeah but now I don't know 
> which parts of the language and library I can use and it's 
> awkward to put nogc everywhere".
>
> I do some free time game development work in various languages, 
> even GC ones and the existence of GC was never a big issue for 
> me. Sure, I am not a super mighty C++ programmer, so I don't 
> know much, but for me it's more important as a gamedev to have 
> features such as operator overloading, value types/be able to 
> cast Vector3f[] to float[] without copying (something C/C++/D 
> can do, for example Java can't do, C# can partially do that 
> with LayoutKind.Sequential), accessibility of C bindings for 
> popular libraries like SDL, SFML, ODE.
>
> nogc, betterC, interfacing to C++, at most they get a "hmm, 
> that's interesting", but I haven't really seen them bring 
> people to D. And I'll take a fun and convenient language over 
> performant one any day.

As I said, I wanted to explain the roots of the GC phobia for 
some C++ developers.

If you don't agree when I said that one allocation during a C++ 
game loop is no problem, which one allocation during a GC 
language game loop MAY eventually become a problem, that's fine 
by me.

But as many people here told me to "disable the GC" to completely 
avoid this potential risk of game freeze, I guess that all those 
D experts are also wrong in giving me this advice.