D for Game Development

Sat Aug 8 20:34:48 PDT 2015

On 9/08/2015 2:40 p.m., Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 6 August 2015 at 21:46, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On 6/08/2015 11:30 p.m., Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>>
>>> On 6 August 2015 at 21:23, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d
>>> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 6/08/2015 11:18 p.m., Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 5 August 2015 at 05:13, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d
>>>>> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 5/08/2015 6:59 a.m., develop32 wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 13:43:35 UTC, karabuta wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> D is really cool and makes a good candidate for developing a game.
>>>>>>>> Are
>>>>>>>> there any guys out there using D for indie games?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Not an indie game, but Remedy is making Quantum Break using D.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Got a source for that? As I can't find it.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi. I dunnit, and I did a talk about it at dconf2013.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I knew you were involved with them back then. I was more interested in
>>>> anything that happened after that.
>>>
>>>
>>> It took a lot longer for us to get the compiler to a sufficiently
>>> stable state that we were able to build reliably than we'd liked. In
>>> the mean time, code pegged for D was forced to be written in C, so a
>>> lot of D code ended out being C code on account of 'couldn't wait'.
>>> When I left, there were a couple of critical systems running in D, and
>>> a few toolchain issues left to work out (Windows DLL's + GC). It was
>>> left with Ethan who occasionally appears here.
>>> I'm not sure where it went after that. There was much enthusiasm among
>>> the team, but the toolchain progressed slower than we could afford,
>>> and we just had to get on with it in some cases. Hopefully there's
>>> still some D code in there, and (if the problems were fixed!) there's
>>> no good reason why it wouldn't have scaled out from where I left it.
>>
>>
>> Yeah I hope it had. Although would be nice to hear from Remedy what they
>> currently use / think of D.
>> I kinda hoped that they had released e.g. a blog post about it, which they
>> haven't.
>
> Our experience wasn't really positive. Can't/don't-want-to write a
> blog post about that.
> Trust me, we were very enthusiastic to stand at GDC and give a lecture
> about our experience, but it didn't really go according to plan,
> mostly blocked by trivial shit that's been known problems for at least
> as long as I've been around here.
> It's not so much language problems, it's tooling problems. It's the
> most important and perhaps most neglected aspect of the D ecosystem.
>
> 1. DMD has unsatisfactory codegen for anything other than debug builds.
> 2. DMD generates x87 code, and uses real everywhere. We can't be
> generating new x87+real instructions in 2015. It's deprecated
> hardware!
> 2. LDC has a lot more bugs than DMD (which still has quite a few
> bugs), and the Windows build is new and even more immature still.
> 3. LDC has no debuginfo. **biggest practical issue by far!**
> 4. LDC/GDC are always a few versions behind DMD. This creates an
> awkward/almost-impossible situation when you rely on DMD to build
> debug code, and LDC to build releasable code. Depending on 2 flaky
> compilers is even less fun than one.
> 5. DLL's were really flakey at the time, I'm not sure how they are
> now, but I'm concerned they may not be much better.
> 6. Shared druntime; we were loading D code from DLL's, lots of them.
> It's not really reasonable for each DLL to have it's own druntime
> instance, they need to share one provided by the host app.
> 7. D binaries are *gigantic*, I don't know why. D seems to link the
> world, and I'm certain that most of the crap that's linked is never
> referenced or executed... it just makes gigantic binaries for some
> reason, even with line-for-line translations of C/C++ code. That's not
> real good on games consoles where icache is king.
>
>
> I tried to use D in my current workplace on 3 occasions now, and ran
> into a different set of problems.
> In the first attempt I tried to write a simple vibe.d webserver app,
> but it kept crashing randomly when I was using the API's exactly as
> intended (apparently a client was posting `/n` instead of `/r/n`, or
> maybe the inverse of that, and it didn't like it). The IDE/debugging
> situation is basically impossible; vibe.d throws exceptions all over
> the place, with no really good tools for debugging this sort of thing.
> My colleagues freaked out and thought I was crazy, and my credibility
> was diminished.
>
> In my second attempt, progress was interrupted by some ICE's, linking
> with some C++ code caused various problems.
>
> I investigated making another attempt to use D where we have some web
> front-end code that's built using Emscripten. D would have been
> perfect for this job, but LDC can't target Emscripten and/or NaCl. I
> don't see that coming along any time soon. I briefly looked at trying
> to make an Emscripten build of LDC, but it requires probably weeks
> worth of research and expert knowledge to approach it.
>
> A final recent attempt was basically a non-starter on account of no Qt
> bindings that work &&/|| are up to date.
>
> I'm using C++11 now, it's horrible. Let me repeat, it's HORRIBLE, but
> it's *possible* to get my work done... and that's more important than
> literally anything else.
>
> I'm getting pretty close to calling it a day. Is 6 years enough time
> to repeatedly prove to myself that I'm chasing a fantasy?
> People keep talking about Rust, I'm thinking of giving it a shot.
>
> I think D needs a budget, and paid programmers employed to do boring
> shit that makes the whole thing more stable and robust. Mozilla seems
> to have this(?)
> D seems to consistently offer 95% solutions to problems. 95% is not a
> solution, it's just another problem.
>
> Oops, I ranted. Sorry! :)

Don't worry about it!
But I see your point. All we can do is truck on.

You will enjoy my latest blog post I think[0].
I reiterate one thing, if it's hard, it's probably wrong. So, lets make 
things easy. Build a wide range a libraries to make certain programs 
easy to write.

Something I'd like to say is that I do really appreciate you and your 
work. If I could I would love to learn from you directly. I cannot give 
a higher respect or appreciation then that.
Even though it is hard for you to still be here, I hope you do continue 
to help D grow. This is a good community, we just need time before real 
adoption. E.g. we are only just now starting to unify projects.

[0] 
http://cattermole.co.nz/blog/uncategorized/where-goes-game-development-in-d/