PSP emulator written in D

[Peter Alexander]

On 9/08/11 10:15 PM, bearophile wrote:
> So to blow on this tiny fire, do you know ways to improve the D2 language and D2 Phobos to help game development?

There's different levels of game developer. Indies will mostly want 
convenience, but AAA developers need control.

For example, a good vector + matrix + quaternion math library would be 
great for indies, but AAA developers would likely write their own, even 
if the library was highly optimised with SIMD, floatInVec etc.

SIMD intrinsics are obviously essential for AAA development.

The garbage collector is something that still needs work. My current 
project has several second stalls every once in a while due to the GC 
(indies might be happy to miss a frame or two (30-60ms) but AAA 
developers won't, so you either don't use the GC, or it has to collect 
in under a couple of ms).

I managed to remove all my per-frame allocations, but this was not easy. 
I had to modify my druntime to print out when allocations where 
happening to find them (most were those static array initialisations 
that I often talk about).

Of course, having libraries available for audio/image 
loading/manipulation is helpful, and bindings for OpenGL etc. but those 
are already available through Derelict. I don't think they need to be in 
Phobos.

The most important thing at the moment is just to get the language into 
a usable state and to get all the advertised features working. We also 
need more tutorials and resources to explain the subtler parts of D2 
(e.g. when, why and how template alias parameters work).