A Perspective on D from game industry

[Burp via Digitalmars-d]

>Gamedev is about solutions being given (MSVC, closed console 
>platform
>tools, etc), and they are just waiting for the package to appear.
>It's not entirely unreasonable either. Most people probably don't
>realise how high-stress and unfair the gamedev industry is when 
>it
>comes to engineers time and commitment to their work.
>To say that they literally have no time to spend on 
>extra-curricular
>projects is an understatement, and risk-aversion is a key form of
>self-defence. I know many gamedev's who are frequently expected 
>to
>choose between their life and families, or their jobs.

  There are some gamedev jobs that aren't like this. My last one 
was 40 hrs/week and never a minute more.

> One thing I do think needs more emphasis though, is the true 
> costs of
> 'compile time parameters'.
> People tend to only consider runtime performance, and rarely 
> consider
> it in relation to binary bloat, or more subtle forms of 
> performance
> impact, like icache misses, which are more difficult to 
> measure, and
> rarely express themselves in benchmark environments.


  I see gamedev's use this as an excuse too much, it is mostly 
bunk. They would have manually written it N times anyway, or they 
simply put code into a template that didn't need to be.


  Anyway to make D attractive to game development?
1. VisualD needs to be on par with Visual Assist
2. D needs to figure out what the hell it is doing with 
GC/RC/Memory
3. Target all common platforms
4. Allow for C++ and D to call each other without requiring a C 
interop layer.(not going to happen but would help immensely)