D and the world

[Dan]

David B. Held Wrote:

> Bill Baxter wrote:
> > [...]
> > That said, there will always be that 5% of code that really really needs 
> > the maximum performance the machine can deliver.  I'd definitely rather 
> > write that in D than Fortran, C, or C++.
> 
> I think this number is much bigger than 5%.  Consider that much of PC 
> advancement has come at the hands of gamers, and gamers demand the kind 
> of performance that will never be delivered by a VM.  Whereas pr0n just 
> drives video playback performance, games drive everything from display 
> rendering to physics simulation to network performance, which is why 
> games are written almost exclusively in C and C++ and comprise about a 
> $10 billion/year industry.  If you also consider that scientific and 
> large-scale apps are almost never written on top of a VM, you are "just 
> left" with mid- to low-end business and consumer apps.  That's still a 
> sizable chunk of the market, but by no means 95%.  People have been 
> predicting the demise of C++ almost since the beginning of Java, and 
> yet, a decade later, it is still one of the top two languages in the 
> world, even though Java has much better tool support and a vast army of 
> programmers.
> 
> If D captured the video game market, that would be a total coup from a 
> PL perspective.  I think that would be a pretty nifty target, but would 
> require a huge investment in the toolchain.
> 
> Dave


I agree.  Target C++ not Java.  : )

AST Reflection would allow people to 'correctly' (not with strings)produce stuff like that FPU asm code generator, which we ought to develop as a community and integrate into D itself.

Doing so will allow D to take advantage of 3DNow, MMX, SSE, SSE2, and x86-64 instructions based on a version switch; and generate the Agner Fog and Paul Hseih kind of optimal assembler that a good C++ game programmer has wet dreams about.

At that point, D will be able to outperform C++ where it really counts, as well as being more flexible, syntactically sexier and std free.

: D