A Perspective on D from game industry

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 18 June 2014 at 08:27:57 UTC, Rikki Cattermole 
wrote:
> On 18/06/2014 8:21 p.m., Wanderer wrote:
>> 3. Stable, efficient and well-documented runtime library, 
>> including
>> collection classes, IO, date/time, concurrency, GUI, graphics, 
>> sound etc.

I don't really think big standard libraries are all that 
important. You need the basic ADTs that cover the holes in the 
language and some basic interfaces for streams.

The other stuff is too system specific and will come when the 
language is stable, capable and the runtime/GC is (commercial) 
production level. I think it is wrong for a system level language 
to create emulation layers in the runtime to even out OS 
differences (which only work for Posixy OSes). It is better to 
have semi-official OS-X bindings, Windows bindings, Posix 
bindings etc.

Look at the std C libs, which is pretty small, but quite obsolete 
due to its CLI/unix roots. std libs should never be obsolete due 
to changes in the environment.

>> 4. A well-designed IDE written purely in D, which allows 
>> analysis and
>> refactoring (like IntelliJ IDEA which is written in Java), 
>> free of course.

The low hanging fruit is a community effort towards Eclipse.

> Something that I was thinking about, was about building the 
> ecosystem up but not in a purely free way.
> Duel licensing. Free for opensource, education and personal 
> use. Not free for commercial use. Buy the IDE, buy the lot kind 
> of deal.

The basics have to be open source and free, meaning at least an 
Eclipse level IDE. Then you can have commercial fine tuned tools 
in addition to that (like a commercial vendor targeting PNACL, 
Windows or iOS).

I don't think dual licensing through dlang.org is a good idea. It 
erodes the perception of dlang.org being a "foundation" and turns 
it into "freeloading company". That's usually bad if you want 
volunteers. SUN was quite nice with open source, but received 
almost no external contribution (compared to BSD/Linux). The 
original source should be perceived as altruistic. I think Walter 
Bright does that part quite well.

Better to have external entities do the commercial heavy lifting 
IMO.