D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[David Nadlinger]

On Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 13:33:39 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> I asked David Nadlinger at the conference whether we could 
> leverage this power in LDC, since LLVM is the compiler back-end 
> used by Apple, but he said all those optimization passes are in 
> the Objective-C front-end.

Hm, apparently I was imprecise or I slightly misunderstood your 
question:

The actual optimizations _are_ done in LLVM, and are part of its 
source tree (see lib/Transforms/ObjCARC). What I meant to say is 
that they are tied to the ObjC runtime function calls emitted by 
Clang – there is no notion of a "reference counted pointer" on 
the LLVM level.

Thus, we could definitely base a similar implementation D on 
this, which would recognize D runtime calls (potentially 
accompanied by D-specific LLVM metadata) instead of Objective-C 
ones. It's just that there would be quite a bit of adjusting 
involved, as the ObjC ARC implementation isn't designed to be 
language-agnostic.

David