D as a Unity3D language

[F i L]

On Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 14:21:43 UTC, Joel Lamotte 
wrote:
> So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in 
> my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool 
> and library support for my domain and other similar things and 
> it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific 
> game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to 
> the roof.
>
> I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact 
> Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to 
> have D as one of the possible scripting language?
>
> I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ 
> can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting 
> language for it would be very interesting at least on the 
> educational point.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Joel Lamotte

I doubt the Unity3D team will have much interest in adapting D to 
their engine, unfortunately. It just isn't cost effective, 
there's no real benefit over C# for what Unity makes use of 
(besides possibly getting rid of the Mono dependency). I'm pretty 
sure Unity also makes use of C#'s runtime reflection capabilities 
to dynamically bind to script events and properties. D is mostly 
just as capable as C# with runtime reflection (to my knowledge), 
but you have to build out structures manually, and it's much more 
difficult.

A better idea would be to make a new Game Engine completely 
written in D, which also uses D for "scripts". You'd still need 
to build runtime reflection structures for anything like Unity's 
editor, though. I was playing around with D the other day with a 
similar motive, but I never really came up with a solution on how 
to dynamically bind a delegate to a "unknown" type's function.