D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Brad Anderson]

While there hasn't been anything official, I think it's a safe 
bet to say that D is being used for a major title, Remedy's 
Quantum Break, featured prominently during the announcement of 
Xbox One. Quantum Break doesn't come out until 2014 so the 
timeline seems about right (Remedy doesn't appear to work on more 
than one game at a time from what I can tell).


That's pretty huge news.


Now I'm wondering what can be done to foster this newly acquired 
credibility in games.  By far the biggest issue I hear about when 
it comes to people working on games in D is the garbage 
collector.  You can work around the GC without too much 
difficulty as Manu's experience shared in his DConf talk shows 
but a lot of people new to D don't know how to do that.  We could 
also use some tools and guides to help people identify and avoid 
GC use when necessary.

@nogc comes to mind (I believe Andrei mentioned it during one of 
the talks released). [1][2]

Johannes Pfau's work in progress -vgc command line option [3] 
would be another great tool that would help people identify GC 
allocations.  This or something similar could also be used to 
document throughout phobos when GC allocations can happen (and 
help eliminate it where it makes sense to).

There was a lot of interesting stuff in Benjamin Thaut's article 
about GC versus manual memory management in a game [4] and the 
discussion about it on the forums [5].  A lot of this collective 
knowledge built up on manual memory management techniques 
specific to D should probably be formalized and added to the 
official documentation.  There is a Memory Management [6] page in 
the documentation but it appears to be rather dated at this point 
and not particularly applicable to modern D2 (no mention of 
emplace or scoped and it talks about using delete and scope 
classes).

Game development is one place D can really get a foothold but all 
too often the GC is held over D's head because people taking 
their first look at D don't know how to avoid using it and often 
don't realize you can avoid using it entirely. This is easily the 
most common issue raised by newcomers to D with a C or C++ 
background that I see in the #d IRC channel (many of which are 
interested in game dev but concerned the GC will kill their 
game's performance).


1: http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5219
2: http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP18
3: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1886
4: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20#more-20
5: http://forum.dlang.org/post/k27bh7$t7f$1@digitalmars.com
6: http://dlang.org/memory.html