Games people play

[Walter Bright]

Lutger wrote:
> Just wondering whether it is a new language feature that game developers 
> want. Tool, library and company support, general acceptance, marketing 
> etc seems to be an important part of the equation.
>  From some developers at gamedev.net I understand that it is even the 
> opposite: D is not a proven language and might have too much, not too 
> few language features. Allow me to quote from a thread over there:
> 
> "Compared to C, C++ is a really really big language. It has a lot of 
> features. It is so complex, in fact, that its features begin to interact 
> in unintended ways. A great example of this is the thread on default 
> arguments and virtual function binding. Who knew that those two 
> features--which theoretically are unrelated--would combine to form 
> unexpected-looking behavior? Or that template arguments could break 
> preprocessor macros? There's plenty of examples of this, many chronicled 
> on GotW and many more still being discovered by hapless C++ students and 
> intrepid Boost developers.
> 
> And D goes so, so much further. The designers have a "why not" attitude 
> towards adding useful-sounding features, with the result that D's 
> feature list makes C++ look downright minimalist. Many of these features 
> are new to the entire extended language family, or have been implemented 
> in radically different ways than previously in the extended language 
> family. Are mixins going to cause a problem with lambdas? Is liberal use 
> of slices going to make DBC unmaintainable? Who knows! Who's going to 
> find out? The early adopters.
> 
> I hope that D gains traction among some large body of hypothetical 
> developers who, despite not being rabid D fans, end up using it in large 
> applications with a long lifecycle. I hope this happens, because this is 
> the only way to vet a language. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe D will all hang 
> together and the features will turn out to mesh perfectly and I'll come 
> to terms with the syntactic features I dislike and everything will be 
> great. I just don't think that it's likely."

On the one hand, that is a valid concern. Many of the bug reports are 
coming from unexpected interactions between features. What can be done 
with the combination of all those capabilities has yet to be fully explored.

But on the other hand, I don't think this is a reason to be hesitant to 
use D. If those more unusual combinations cause a problem, just don't 
use them that way. It isn't necessary to remove the features from the 
language!