D for Game Development

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

Everyone always references Minecraft, but that's not the only 
Java game out there. There are quite a few on Steam. You'll never 
even know they're Java if you don't follow their development, as 
they ship with a bundled JRE. The Java games that perform poorly 
or hog resources are always held up as an example of why Java is 
a dog or why GC for games is a problem, but then the ones that 
perform well don't even become part of the conversation.

Experienced Java game developers know how to code to the GC and 
tune their apps to maximize performance. There's quite a lot of 
knowledge tucked away in the posts at java-gaming.org, where 
they've shared their experience and their games. The GC itself is 
not a deal breaker, nor is the Java language. People prove it 
every day.

The same can be true of D. When enough D experience has been 
accumulated and shared, people will be writing games that take 
the GC into account. There's no reason to avoid it completely. It 
can be made to work for you. Even today, games in C and C++ focus 
on minimizing allocations, using the stack as much as possible 
and setting aside as much heap memory up front as they can. Given 
that collections in D only run during allocations, there's no 
reason why that same strategy won't work in D. It's all about 
strategy and profiling, finding what hurts performance and 
learning how to avoid it.