48 hour game jam

[Ethan]

On Monday, 15 October 2012 at 16:46:38 UTC, F i L wrote:
> ps. I'm surprised I don't see a bunch of 'final ...' throughout 
> your code. I thought a big issue of yours in the past was D's 
> auto-virtual functions. Has something been changed in that area 
> that I missed, or have you just not gotten around to doing it 
> (or you don't need it for this project)?

Well, the main reason for that is because I wrote a large chunk
of the code. I didn't come across any area where final was needed
because I kept the code heirarchy very shallow and relied on
inheriting from multiple interfaces.

So. I'm a D newbie. I've looked at this site before, but the only
time I looked in to the language in any depth was last Thursday
night when I read the introductory chapter of Andrei's D book.
Turns out that the first chapter, combined with C++ and C#
knowledge and sitting in earshot of Manu for when I had questions
about how D works, was all I needed to write game logic from
scratch.

Straight up, I'm fairly impressed with the language. I've been
moaning for years that there aren't any system level/performance
oriented languages coming out with all of the nice things found
in programming languages created in the 30-odd years since C++
was unleashed upon the world.

The code I wrote was definitely more inspired by C# than C++, but
I didn't really want to go in to the jam trying to write C# code
in another language. I tried to do things in a more D like way. I
think I succeeded in some areas - such as the one line creation
table where we used to use an entire 1000+ line file back in the
PS2 days - but towards the end I definitely started falling back
in to more C++ style coding just to get stuff in the game and
working.

I'll definitely be looking more in-depth in to D, but I have
already come across a few things that make me think it's about
99% ready for production code instead of the full 100%. I'll go
in to more detail in another thread, but I did find it odd that D
is a language that aims to make life easier for the programmer
yet makes you jump through hoops at times.

I'll be pretty happy to leave C++ behind when D2 is rock solid.