Can D get on XBone and PS4?

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 19/01/2015 12:39 p.m., Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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.

$ dub add-local .
Could be rather useful here!

> 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 >_<
>