Programming a Game in D? :D

[eles via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 20:58:34 UTC, Foo wrote:
> On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 20:38:59 UTC, David wrote:
>> Hi, not too sure if there's still someone reading this post, 
>> but i do have another question. So, I heared so much good 
>> stuff about D, it's powerfull, fast the syntax is nice, but 
>> well, why is D actually not used for common games yet? (I mean 
>> I know about some smaller projects, but nothing "big")
>
> Because D has a GC, is unstable and has many many bugs (even an 
> ape could find some).

I am not in the game industry, but in other time-constrained 
industry (realtime). For me, it nails down to GC and lack of 
volatiles.

I tried to use it for some scripting, but finally reverted back 
to simple Bash and some Python.

My opinion on the matter is that, in order to succeed, D really 
must become a tool that could be used everywhere. The discourse 
that "yes, but you could do that part in C (speaking about 
realtime)" usually receives this kind of reply: "yes, but, then, 
why bother? If I have C for this part, I have Bash for the other 
and C# for the GUIs".

As long as it does not try to cover all the range, the 
differential that it offers wrt C+C#/Java+Bash/Python does not 
seems conclusive enough to justify the effort.

Add to this the quality of tools, which are still in their 
infancy (just consider dynamic libs, debug support, IDE support, 
static analysis tools etc.)

Well, feel free to destroy it. But I tried to use it at my 
workplace. It is a nice language, but the differential is simply 
not enough. The main selling point would be its potential 
ubiquity ("hey, boss, one language to rule them all!"), but here 
it fails short in systems programming, embedded realtime 
programming and, as far as I hear, in massive 
multi-threading/couroutines where Go is better. And C# has that 
async...

I agree it is a bit o chicken and egg problem: "we don't invest 
in D because is not popular/ the language is not popular because 
nobody invest in it". That's true, but, as I tried it, in the end 
the marginal gain was too small for us to continue on this road. 
It matters less for us to be able to use slices than it matters 
to have robust and time-predictable code.