D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Rob T]

On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 18:13:17 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
>
> @nogc comes to mind (I believe Andrei mentioned it during one 
> of the talks released). [1][2]
>

I would love to have something like @nogc to guarantee there's no 
hidden or misplaced allocations in a section of code or 
optionally throughout the entire application.

Not only is the GC a cause of concern for game devs, it is also a 
concern for general systems development. For example I have a 
simple virtual network device driver that I'd like to re-write 
from C++ to D. It does not need a GC at all, all memory is 
preallocated in advance of use during initialization and it does 
not need anything from Phobos. If I could easily cut out the GC 
even from the executable binary that would be great, provided 
that I was certain that no allocations were going on by mistake. 
Yes I know I can get rid of the GC, but there should be an 
elegant solution for doing it that guarantees I am not using 
features of the language that require the GC.

Keep in mind that even if the GC was improved, there will still 
be plenty of systems applications that will not require the GC, 
so while improving the GC is a huge deal in itself, it is still 
not a general solution for those who do not need a GC at all and 
want to be certain they are not allocating by mistake.

--rt