Who here actually uses D?

[Jean Crystof]

Robert Clipsham Wrote:

> Having seen a post by Peter Alexander (in Re: D for game development), 
> mentioning some of the issues he's hit I thought I'd post this. I've 
> been in his shoes (every other time I use D it seems), and feel I should 
> ask - who here uses D, and to what extent?
> 
> I'm mostly interested in those of you with 1000 Line plus projects in D, 
> as that's when I've found I start hitting issues.
> 
> Just to clarify, for those D purists among you... I'm not trolling, just 
> curious (I wouldn't normally have asked, but now I know I'm not paranoid 
> and the only one having problems, I thought I'd ask).

We used D in a college project. It's a Wolfenstein 3D clone (simple ray caster engine, untextured floor and ceil, our own software renderer, uses SDL) written in D1 by 7 persons. Thanks to fast compile speed we were able to use TDD heavily. The game is about 105 kLOC and the unittest suite 280 kLOC with documents. We were impressed how tight code was possible to write in D (FPS games can have millions lines of code) and how unittests were integrated in the language. We would not have been able to implement anything as complex in C++ or Java in only 3 months. Maybe a tic tac toe or tetris. My role was porting Java/C++ type coding style of other members in more like D as the repository master. They quickly learned more advanced idioms.

We encountered one forward reference bug, but it disappeared when restructuring program. No other bugs were found in D and we updated the compiler in 1-7 days when a new came.