Who here actually uses D?

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On 02.01.2011 1:22, Robert Clipsham wrote:
> Having seen a post by Peter Alexander (in Re: D for game development), 
> mentioning some of the issues he's hit I thought I'd post this. I've 
> been in his shoes (every other time I use D it seems), and feel I 
> should ask - who here uses D, and to what extent?
>
I started using it precisely for a hobby game project with a couple of 
friends. The project itself was soon abandoned due to lack of 
time/interest from most of its designers. Yet I decided to publish and 
maintain a port of DMDscript in D2, which would have been used as 
scripting engine. It's 27 KLOC as by wc *.d, but, yes, it's a very 
conservative D. I found two major bugs (both memory corruption) and 
still don't have time to narrow them down. One is somehow related to 
built-in AA, the other about throwing object not derived from Throwable. 
Workaround for the second one was trivial, as for the first one, I just 
use David Simcha's RandAA instead.

While the latest game techdemo is only 3kloc, all in more modern D2 with 
bells and whistles, because I also wanted to experiment with D2 features 
. It was written in days of dmd 2.40-2.41 with LRU array append  bugs 
and such, and I faced only some minor issues. The closest thing to 
blocker was http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4481, but it 
has easy workaround. Besides, I can't reproduce it with latest dmd 
(maybe I should close it ).

> I'm mostly interested in those of you with 1000 Line plus projects in 
> D, as that's when I've found I start hitting issues.
>
> Just to clarify, for those D purists among you... I'm not trolling, 
> just curious (I wouldn't normally have asked, but now I know I'm not 
> paranoid and the only one having problems, I thought I'd ask).
>
My recipe with D2 for now :
- stay away form inout & use immutability only with built-in types
- use malloc & emplace for big memory blocks
- don't push GC too hard, allocate only when it's really necessary (no 
Java style new-new-new)
- CTFE still has a long road to catch up with the rest, don't expect too 
much of it
- no *heavy* reliance on static introspection, and auto-magic things 
like array ops

So far, works just fine.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky