D for Game Development

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 9 August 2015 at 11:07, Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> Am Sun, 9 Aug 2015 00:32:00 -0700
> schrieb Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>:
>
> > On 8/8/2015 11:36 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> > > On Sunday, 9 August 2015 at 05:18:33 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
> > >> dmd not being deprecated continues the cycle of gdc/ldc lagging
> > >> versions behind and being understaffed in manpower.
> > >
> > > I think another point to look at is how far gdc and ldc have come
> > > while still having so few people working on them. Clearly they are
> > > able to get more done faster because they can leverage the work of
> > > the llvm and gcc devs. Seems silly that the majority of our talent
> > > is focused on dmd when it is the slowest of the bunch. D's "not
> > > made here" syndrome strikes again!
> >
> > There's pretty much no talent focused on the dmd back end. I do most
> > of the (very) occasional bug fixes, and sometimes Martin or Daniel
> > correct something, and that's about it.
> >
> > The idea that it is sucking up resources is incorrect.
> >
>
> The DMD devs aren't working on the backend, but the GDC and LDC are
> neither ;-) He's talking about the glue layer.
>
> DMD has the advantage that whenever a frontend pull request requires
> glue layer changes you get at and once by the contributor. But for
> LDC and GDC the glue layer changes have to be implemented by GDC/LDC
> devs.
>

I think that is more of a problem with length of development + number of
contributors/changes.

For instance, when it was just Walter committing changes, the number of
"fixed" bugs was of a reasonable number such that I could have gone through
them all and tested them within a day (this is back when the D2 testsuite
was private and I had no way other way to track whether or not codegen
changes were required).

Now we have the testsuite, which seems to be a good enough gauge for
finding problems.  However if there's been a change (eg: refactor) between
what codegen is lowered in the frontend vs. glue, then it becomes a commit
hunt trawling through thousands of changes to work out which one is
relevant to the new wrong-code-on-previously-working test.  One day turns
into a week, turns into a month, turns into half a year.

Iain.
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