D is our last hope

[Mike Shah]

On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 05:46:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/8/2023 1:06 AM, Hors wrote:
>> This is one of biggest mistakes in dlang's design. They tried 
>> to be "everything" (being both garbage collected and not, 
>> being both safe and unsafe system language...), it backfired 
>> because as you said, you always need to exclude some people or 
>> features.
>
> I often use a mix of gc and malloc in a program - they each 
> have their uses. It's sort of like using a struct or using a 
> class - they coexist fine, and you can mix and match as you 
> please.
>
> Rust also has both safe and unsafe code.

It would be interesting to hear from AAA game devs on this thread 
regarding their thoughts on garbage collection.

Unreal Engine implemented a garbage collector for their UObject 
(https://unrealcommunity.wiki/garbage-collection-36d1da) and the 
collector runs every 30-60 seconds.

Many game studios implement their own STL (Or rather standard 
library, avoiding templates) in C++ for debuggability and 
creating special cases for data structures (See EASTL as an 
example).

I think the major factor with D not being adopted more by AAA 
studios is legacy C and C++ codebases. Some game studios live 
title to title, so it's hard to start from scratch. Otherwise 
there may also exist other approval issues of getting LDC 
available on consoles with the Developer Kits (Again, need 
advocates to do this effectively volunteering after work to sell 
the idea).

Worth also listening to Ethan Watson's talk: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YjLW7anNfc

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts.