On Wednesday, 4 July 2018 at 08:50:57 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
But indeed, being able use D in a GC-free environment (like C++
and Rust do) would be something many people may NEED, for
instance to be able to EASILY use D for soft-realtime
applications like games.
This has to be the no. 1 excuse.
Why is C++ the language of choice currently? My bet is
productivity and economic concerns. Amongst other things the
productivity gain from resource management via constructor and
destructor. Which solves like 75% of the headaches of manual
resource management and goto nightmares.
Back in the day when C was used to make games, the excuse not to
use C++ was vtable, exception and RTTI overhead. Now it's called
the bare metal best performance language which everything and
their grandma is measured against. This C++ overhead didn't make
C any slower or C++ any faster than C but it made C++ superior in
productivity.
This was around 2002/03, and C++, at the time, some 23+ years old.
Games have been made with GC'd languages, 3D games, even. And
successfully, too.
Minecraft, a very successful one, comes to mind, which is or at
least was made in Java.
Plenty of games are made in C#, too.
My bet, again, would be productivity and economic concerns. The
countless hours wasted on debugging memory leaks and cyclic
dependencies are better spent making the actual game/software.
And smart pointers introduce overhead of their own which makes
them inferior to C's bare metal raw pointer performance - or GC'd
pointers for that matter. The culprit being the collection cycle.
The best thing about this whole argument, however, is the claim
for GC no can do and with the next breath they pull LUA into
their games. A scripting language that brings a VM, GC and
extraordinarily inflated loading times when the scripts are
compiled to byte code at the end user's PC which make C64 loading
times shine.
The reasoning probably being productivity again and C++'s lunch
break compile times.
Using the D compiler as a library, instead of LUA, D code could
be used for 'scripting', as well, and compiled to native machine
code. In a snap.
I have no metrics between any AAA game engine and their port to D
but I do know that I wrote a sound/music player library in Java,
which folks like you claim impossible because GC, never bothered
with GC and had no performance issues whatsoever - and I don't
expect any porting it to D.
And there is EASTL. A STL made by Electronic Arts. Because the
standard implementation shipped with the compiler is too slow ?
Even though written by C++ wizards ?
Slow code is slow and allocating memory in a tight loop is a huge
performance killer - regardless of language.
Also, why do you feel like a GC is inacceptable for games but
doesn't matter for your file handling program? Handling dozens,
maybe thousands, of files sounds like an awful lot of memory
management involved and whether a e.g. grep takes 15 seconds to
do it's job or under 1 matters not?
Nothing forces anyone to use the GC, memory can be managed
manually via malloc/free and you get to do it with scope
statements/nested functions which makes it nicer than in C. You
could also implement shared/weak ptr stuff in D - warts and all.
If you need a GC free standard library, I believe there is an
ongoing effort -or several- at code.dlang.org and probably other
places.
You said do this and that, GC, etc. to motivate C++ folks to come
to D. I say it's an excuse not to use D and no matter the effort
of advertising, a GC free phobos, etc. on part of the D-Lang
Foundation and contributors would make these folks switch. They
would simply find a different excuse.
And where's the usefulness of toy examples like 2 line web
servers which essentially do nothing?
And how is that helping with getting attention from the game devs
?
Putting on the front page a 12 line maze game which can be
imported from the standard library? Not using the GC?
