Can D get on XBone and PS4?

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 18 January 2015 at 19:56, Joakim via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 08:06:06 UTC, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> At Remedy, we ran D code on xbone with no opposition from MS.
>> For xbone, we wanted to maintain compatibility with the rest of our
>> MSVC code, which meant we needed to produce COFF output that the MSVC
>> linker accepts. Walter implemented DMD-Win64 with these requirements
>> in mind.
>> PS4 should be easier using LDC, but I don't know if Sony would take
>> issue with this. I expect them to take less issue than MS, so I'd give
>> good odd's that they'd be fine with it.
>>
>> Short answer, D works on modern consoles just fine, and there were no
>> political blocks for us. GC is a demonstrated problem; avoid it. DMD's
>> codegen is also a problem; it uses x87 to perform operations, despite
>> the fact the x64 ABI uses SSE regs for float passing. That results in
>> a lot of register switching, and poor float performance as a result.
>> As an (awkward) workaround, you can use explicit SSE intrinsics to
>> keep working in XMM, but I haven't tested the optimiser's quality in
>> that case, and the std library obviously doesn't do that.
>
>
> Thanks for the detailed answer.  Sounds like the only thing holding D back
> is someone putting in the effort to integrate it with the console runtime
> and APIs.  It's not going to be me, as I haven't owned a console or even
> played a console game in a decade.  Yes, I know I'm an old fogey. :)

I don't think there's any particularly compelling reason to make
runtime calls from D. You can link C/C++ and D code together just
fine. If you're a gamedev, there's a very high chance that you already
have an engine (presumably C/C++) in place. You'll need to bind the
engine api, not the OS api.
Trouble with the console OS api's are that they're protected by NDA;
it would probably be pretty dubious to release any such foreign
language binding here, so each studio would have to do that work
themselves... unless it were posted on the official dev forums or
something.

If I had to say there was one thing holding D back, it's Win64 support
in LLVM. We really need LDC for comprehensive gamedev. DMD is okay for
game-logic and script-like code, but the codegen isn't good enough to
do really hot work.
Win64 is almost there in LLVM, the only thing missing that I know of
is CV8 debuginfo. Without that, we can't debug... which is like,
really important >_<