Games people play

[Georg Wrede]

Lutger wrote:
> I'm not a prof. game developer, but I sure agree that D is perfect for 
> it. Just the other day I was looking into the C++ source of civilization 
> 4 (they released a good bulk of it) and thinking how nice it must be for 
> the developers to turn this 125.000 LoC monster that takes more than 15 
> minutes to build into D. And then that is even a small part of the total 
> code. (and oh my god, how ugly it is)

Some day some guys will port something like that to D, initially just 
for the heck of it. In addition to becoming famous and the First to have 
done it, they'll get a unique understanding of the issues. And it would 
look good in their CV, whether they apply for a C++ or D job.

> Just wondering whether it is a new language feature that game developers 
> want. 

Probably not. I guess most would be more glad to have gotten rid of the 
majority of the unnecessary crap and dragstones that C++ has.

Mostly they'd be happy about the cleaner syntax and ease of actually 
writing code.

> Tool, library and company support, general acceptance, marketing 
> etc seems to be an important part of the equation.

Tools, now that's a show stopper. Round trip UML, proper integration 
into Eclipse or MS IDEs, working debuggers, code analysis and metrics 
tols, etc... This should be enough to keep the bigger shops away.

>  From some developers at gamedev.net I understand that it is even the 
> opposite: D is not a proven language and might have too much, not too 
> few language features. Allow me to quote from a thread over there:
> 
> "Compared to C, C++ is a really really big language.
> ...
> And D goes so, so much further. The designers have a "why not" attitude 
> towards adding useful-sounding features, with the result that D's 
> feature list makes C++ look downright minimalist. Many of these features 
> are new to the entire extended language family, or have been implemented 
> in radically different ways than previously in the extended language 
> family. Are mixins going to cause a problem with lambdas? Is liberal use 
> of slices going to make DBC unmaintainable?

Valid.

Except somehow I don't perceive D as a "bigger" language than C++. But I 
admit, this might just be a biased "feeling".

Or, could it be that D actually is bigger than C++ _feature_wise_, while 
C++ is _much_ larger than D when we look at the ramifications of their 
respective feature sets. What I mean is, one could write a "complete" 
book about D, and it still would be just a fraction of the size of 
Stroustrup's "C++". And that's because most of his book explains and 
chews on issues and implications that are unobvious to the reader or 
programmer, and that demand knowing them lest you shoot yourself in the 
foot -- and not even later understand what happened.

D has virtually no such crap, so we can scrap 500 pages right off the bat.

> I hope that D gains traction among some large body of hypothetical 
> developers who, despite not being rabid D fans, end up using it in large 
> applications with a long lifecycle. I hope this happens, because this is 
> the only way to vet a language. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe D will all hang 
> together and the features will turn out to mesh perfectly and I'll come 
> to terms with the syntactic features I dislike and everything will be 
> great. I just don't think that it's likely."
> 
> http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=409926&whichpage=2&#2759437 

Obviously he knows what he's talking about, and he's (at least 
superficially) familiar with D. And that's a heck of a lot better than 
being ignored by that community! :-)