The D Programming Language for Game Development [closed]

Answer 1

I used D 1.x for doing games and demos, some of them are public domain open source (A, B, C, D, E).

D can give you productivity unheard of in C++-land if you are willing to pay the high-price of arguing with everyone about why do you use D.

If you go this route, i advise you to pick D 2.x, Derelict and Visual D (hint for future readers: this is 2011).

As for game development :

• the D GC is not a real problem. It is if you allocate too much in a frame, but that's about it. The classic methods of pooling, reusing, etc... work.

• you can write x86 assembly portably across Linux, Mac & Windows. Also static if allows pretty fun templated naked assembly functions.

• inlining across module boundaries is working without a "link time optimization" switch

• I find it easier to maintain debug and release version (compared to C++)

• avoid new features and choose compilers conservatively... just like in C++

Answer 2

In D proramming they are:

• derelict who support opengl 3 and opengl 4

most often in a language programming opengl 3 and 4 is not supported

• yage free 3D game engine, your are welcome to help

A little how-to: http://blog.fedora-fr.org/bioinfornatics/post/D-programming-OpenGL-and-MVC-Pattern

For use RAII in D they are the keyword scope it is very powerfull

Answer 3

I've learned quite a bit of D myself lately, although there's still more to go. From what I've learned so far, I would say that, while the language is great for practically anything, the compilers and libraries that are out there right now aren't the best, and so you can't ever be sure that the compiler is bug-free (it's not). For game programming, you'd need to be darn sure that garbage collection is happening correctly, for example, and that the compiler isn't incorrectly optimizing away important code... things like this might want to make you re-think using the language. However, I myself think that the language itself is the best out there (this is completely subjective), and I think the only barrier to using it is the lack of a perfect implementation, rather than the language itself.

Answer 4

I'm looking forward to learning D language someday too :)

But there's one thing to remember: good language is good, but you, as a game developer, need also tools (like libraries) to do your bidding. And few good libraries currently have bindings to D. However, I know of one that most likely (but not certainly) has:

Ogre - one of the leading, if not leading, free-as-in-freedom library for all your portable 3D graphic needs.

Of course you need more, but that pretty much depends on your game.

I'm not aware on how easy or hard is it to make bindings to D for a C++ library. It may be hard, may be easy and somewhat automated. Latter would be pretty much possible, because, as I take it, languages are very close to each other, and D developers probably had C++ in mind a lot of the time.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

From another perspective, D compiles into the same object files (albeit OMF format) as C/C++. One would assume D's optimization of the assembly is comparable to C/C++, regardless, the assembly is always there to hand optimize if you want.

Answer 6

Well, it's not like if You're using D you have to build everything completely from scratch. For example, You can use:

• GLFW for input/output
• Horde3D as rendering engine
• OpenAL for sound
• Bullet for physics
• Lua for scripting
• lzo for fast decompression
• maybe Orange for serialization

I'm not sure about overlays though. It's a pretty solid base which hopefully will work for me :)

Good luck man!