A Perspective on D from game industry

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 17/06/2014 4:44 p.m., H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 04:16:43PM +1200, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On 17/06/2014 3:05 a.m., H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>>> I would personally avoid using string mixins unless there's
>>> absolutely no other way to achieve what you want -- they're a kind of
>>> last-resort nuclear warhead that you don't bring out unless all the
>>> other guns fail to win the battle.
>>
>> I have a rule about string mixins which I believe to be a good one to
>> follow:
>> If using string mixins, don't expose it to client code unless they
>> explicitly want it.
>> Basically what this means is, use something to wrap it like a mixin
>> template but don't just say hey call this function and use it as a
>> string mixin!  Its a little nicer. Also the explicit getting of the
>> string is important for debugging. Sometimes its needed for the more
>> complex cases in edge cases/broken functionality. I use it during
>> development (a simple pragma msg inside the mixin template for
>> example).
>
> Hmm, you know what would be really nice? If there was a way to get at
> the string representation of the fully-expanded form of instantiated
> templates as the compiler sees them before handing them off to codegen.
> Well, OK, I know that's not how the compiler does it, but still,
> something equivalent to this would be very handy for debugging
> deeply-nested templates that currently would just spew walls of
> incomprehensible errors.

A feature that I would love, is the full code output post CTFE. Which is 
kinda what your saying. Would be lovely to see just _exactly_ is going 
into the binary and more importantly where!
I would be very happy even if comments weren't even there.

>> But in saying this, some of this could be handled by opDispatch. Its
>> just a shame that both approaches currently aren't handled for
>> auto-completion by any IDE's. I would expect the string mixin would be
>> one day.
> [...]
>
> String mixins? Auto-completion? I dunno, that sounds like a stretch to
> me. How would an IDE handle autocompletion for things like like:
>
> 	string generateCode() {
> 		string code = "int x=";
> 		if (solveFermatsLastTheorem()) {
> 			code ~= "1";
> 		} else {
> 			code ~= "2";
> 		}
> 		code ~= ";";
> 		return code;
> 	}
> 	int func() {
> 		mixin(generateCode());
> 	}
>
> ?

I would assume a full frontend would be required for this.

>
> T
>