A Perspective on D from game industry

[c0de517e via Digitalmars-d]

>  Anyway to make D attractive to game development?
> 1. VisualD needs to be on par with Visual Assist
> 2. D needs to figure out what the hell it is doing with 
> GC/RC/Memory
> 3. Target all common platforms
> 4. Allow for C++ and D to call each other without requiring a C 
> interop layer.(not going to happen but would help immensely)

3. should be probably done with a backend that compiles to C, 
it's not the default backend anybody would ever use but it would 
give studios the peace of mind of not losing investment when 
moving to a new platform. We deal with new, proprietary platforms 
all the time and no other backend will ever be ported in time to 
ship a title on a "nextgen" console otherwise.

1. and 4. are needed if you want a general C++ replacement, I 
agree but if instead of a being a general C++ replacement it 
started to conquer a niche where it can prove to be incredibly 
useful, we could tolerate even 2., that's what I tried to say in 
the blog post, we use Lua, Lua has horrible GC (well, not really 
GC is a problem, but that everything needs allocations) that 
requires workarounds to be in a shippable state, yet we do use 
Lua a lot across the industry. Because it's the best we can find 
for livecoding. Another example could be ISPC, it's serves a 
niche but it's really useful in that one and we might consider 
integrating it for tight numerical kernels, it's a small section 
of code where a new language could start insinuating itself...