GPU/CPU roadmaps

[Lutger]

bearophile wrote:

> D2/D3 may become a good language to create video games, this is a new
> interesting document that shows some of the things D2 users may want to
> use it for:
> http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/SweeneyHPG2009/TimHPG2009.pdf
> 
> I don't know how D2 can adapt itself to help in such regards.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

Do you think the D language needs to adapt more for this market? From my 
limited perspective, I see numerous things D does, especially in the 
concurrency department, that is on the list of requirements put forth in 
that presentation. 

Furthermore, it's interesting to note some of the numbers pertaining to GOW 
2: 250K LoC for the game and 2000K LoC for the engine, excluding loads of 
libraries like speedtree, openal, etc. So middleware is key right? 
Especially by providing easier ways to program difficult architectures. Now 
this again is something that D can do well, it's very suitable for building 
good libraries. 

Now here is the problem too, they have to be build. Concluding remark of the 
presentation says that if you start building an engine now, you finish in 
2014. I don't think D has a chance on this scale of game development when it 
faces competition from such monster engines in C++.

To return to your original question: what about the systems programming 
aspects of D? For example, cutting out the GC and typeinfo bloat, dealing 
with arrays, whatever. Is this something that good library developers can do 
just on their own or do we need some more support for this? I was thinking 
what it would take to develop a specialized component in D that can be used 
from within a demanding C/C++ ecosystem.