Re: [GD-General] The D Programming Language

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

Jeff,

Thanks for the pointer to the language.  This is one I hadn't heard of
before and it's always useful to check out new developments.

I feel that D has a lot to offer the game programming world.  Too bad
there is not an implementation to start playing with but there are some
really compelling features:

  - Upgrade path from C/C++ is easy and straightforward.  Integration
with other calling conventions are builtin to the language.

  - Excellent support in basic data types -- floating point is a major
focus of the language design.

  - Builtin support to facilitate good programming practices (e.g unit
tests, pre/post conditions, invariants)

  - Modules, which correspond to files, facilitate namespace management
rather than overloading classes with this responsibility.

  - Good array support - including dynamically resizing arrays,
multi-dimesional arrays (both jagged and rectangular), and associative
arrays.

The language still appears to be in the design phase, so this could be
a useful time to be in touch with the author and help shape its future.

Here are some initial thoughts on ways the language might be improved:

  - While modern garbage collectors can be very efficient, I still worry
that they may not be appropriate for gaming.  I will be interested to see
the results of Chris Hecker's work with OCaml, which has an excellent GC
implementation.  The D programming language might want to consider memory
management via regions.  This can be a good compromise for realtime
applications.

  - There are a number of unsafe features for which some kind of pedantic
option to the compiler will be useful (e.g. pointers in unions could
confuse the garbage collector).

  - No syntactic support for inner classes / function closures.  These are
extremely useful features to have although they introduce significant
complexity in the compiler.

  - It would be useful to allow for functions to exist outside of classes.

Any other opinions?

Patrick

On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Grills, Jeff wrote:

>
> To throw another language into the mix:
>
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
>
> This language looks really promising to me.  It seems to retain the things I
> use most in C++, strips away a lot of cruft I don't care for, and adds a lot
> of things I really wish C++ had.  Since there isn't a compiler available for
> it yet, I'm sure that no one has extensive experience in it to understand
> the ugly spots.  Hopefully that will come soon enough to allow the designers
> the opportunity to fix the language before they end up with too much
> production code they don't dare to break (as certainly is the case in C++).
>
> j
> Jeff Grills
> Star Wars Galaxies
> Technology Director, Austin Studios
> Sony Online Entertainment Inc.
>
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