D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Don]

On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 18:22:54 UTC, 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.


It's worth noting that our code at Sociomantic faces *exactly* 
the same issues.
We cannot use Phobos because of its reliance on the GC.
Essentially, we want to have the option of avoiding GC usage in 
every single function.

> 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.

That is only part of the problem with Phobos. The bigger problem 
is with the functions that DO need to allocate memory. In Tango, 
and in our code, all such functions accept a buffer to store the 
results in.
So that, even though they need to allocate memory, if you call 
the function a thousand times, it only allocates memory once, and 
keeps reusing the buffer.

I'm not sure how feasible it is to add that afterwards. I hope it 
can be done without changing all the API's, but I fear it might 
not be.

But anyway, after fixing the obvious Phobos offenders, another 
huge step would be to get TempAlloc into druntime and used 
wherever possible in Phobos.