D on next-gen consoles and for game development

Benjamin Thaut code at benjamin-thaut.de
Fri May 24 11:20:53 PDT 2013


Am 23.05.2013 20:13, schrieb Brad Anderson:
> While there hasn't been anything official, I think it's a safe bet to
> say that D is being used for a major title, Remedy's Quantum Break,
> featured prominently during the announcement of Xbox One. Quantum Break
> doesn't come out until 2014 so the timeline seems about right (Remedy
> doesn't appear to work on more than one game at a time from what I can
> tell).
>
>
> That's pretty huge news.
>
>
> Now I'm wondering what can be done to foster this newly acquired
> credibility in games.  By far the biggest issue I hear about when it
> comes to people working on games in D is the garbage collector.  You can
> work around the GC without too much difficulty as Manu's experience
> shared in his DConf talk shows but a lot of people new to D don't know
> how to do that.  We could also use some tools and guides to help people
> identify and avoid GC use when necessary.
>
> @nogc comes to mind (I believe Andrei mentioned it during one of the
> talks released). [1][2]
>
> Johannes Pfau's work in progress -vgc command line option [3] would be
> another great tool that would help people identify GC allocations.  This
> or something similar could also be used to document throughout phobos
> when GC allocations can happen (and help eliminate it where it makes
> sense to).
>
> There was a lot of interesting stuff in Benjamin Thaut's article about
> GC versus manual memory management in a game [4] and the discussion
> about it on the forums [5].  A lot of this collective knowledge built up
> on manual memory management techniques specific to D should probably be
> formalized and added to the official documentation.  There is a Memory
> Management [6] page in the documentation but it appears to be rather
> dated at this point and not particularly applicable to modern D2 (no
> mention of emplace or scoped and it talks about using delete and scope
> classes).
>
> Game development is one place D can really get a foothold but all too
> often the GC is held over D's head because people taking their first
> look at D don't know how to avoid using it and often don't realize you
> can avoid using it entirely. This is easily the most common issue raised
> by newcomers to D with a C or C++ background that I see in the #d IRC
> channel (many of which are interested in game dev but concerned the GC
> will kill their game's performance).
>
>
> 1: http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5219
> 2: http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP18
> 3: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1886
> 4: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20#more-20
> 5: http://forum.dlang.org/post/k27bh7$t7f$1@digitalmars.com
> 6: http://dlang.org/memory.html

Besides my studies I'm working at havok and the biggest problems most 
likely would be (in order of importance)

- Compiler / druntime for all 9 plattforms we have to support simply do 
not exist
- Full Visual Studio integration needed. Inclusive a really good code 
completion and a very nice debugging experience for all plattforms. 
VisualD is quite nice and debugging using the visual studio debugger 
works quite well but its a real pita that you have to patch dmd and 
compile it from source so you can debug in x64 on windows.
- SIMD: core.simd is just not there yet. The last time I looked really 
basic stuff like unaligned loads where missing.
- The GC. A no go, a GC free version of the runtime (non leaking) should 
be provided.
- Better windows support. All of the developement we do happens on 
windows and most of D's community does not care about windows support. 
I'm curious how long it will take until D will get propper DLL support.

Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut




More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list