D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 08:22:43PM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 05/23/2013 08:13 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> As a starting point, do we have a list of the Phobos functions that
> allocate using GC when there's no need to?  That's a concern of Manu's
> that it ought to be possible to address relatively swiftly if the
> information is to hand.

I listened to Manu's talk yesterday, and I agree with what he said, that
Phobos functions that don't *need* to allocate, shouldn't. Andrei was
also enthusiastic about std.algorithm being almost completely
allocation-free. Maybe we should file bugs (enhancement requests?) for
all such Phobos functions?

On the other hand, perhaps functions that *need* to allocate should be
labelled as such (esp. in the Phobos docs), so that users know what
they're getting into.


T

-- 
My program has no bugs! Only unintentional features...