D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 23 May 2013 21:37:26 +0200
"Kiith-Sa" <kiithsacmp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 18:13:17 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> > 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
> 
> 
> Without official confirmation, I think it's rather early to 
> assume D's
> being used in Quantum Break. D might compile on the new consoles, 
> but
> what about druntime/phobos/etc ?
> 

I'd like to hear an official confirmation (or denial) at this point,
too (assuming Remedy is at a point where they're comfortable making a
statement on the matter - and after all, it would make sense if
they're still keeping open the possibility of backing out of D for
whatever they're using it on by release if they end up needing to do so,
even if such a possibility is very unlikely).

However, I do think it's a safe bet: Like Brad said, Remedy is a
relatively small dev company that doesn't have a history of working on
multiple AAA titles simultaneously. They *are* known to have one other
mystery title besides Quantum Break in development, but it's for iOS -
so it's not a AAA title, and it's definitely not x86, so that one can
definitely be ruled out (unless Manu was messing with us to keep
it super-secret ;) ).

As far as I'm concerned, the whole "Quantum Break uses D" thing *is*
technically a rumor, and I think it's probably best to keep it framed
that way out of respect for Manu and his employer. But it's a very
convincing rumor that I do believe.