On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 08:06:06 UTC, Manu via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
At Remedy, we ran D code on xbone with no opposition from MS.
For xbone, we wanted to maintain compatibility with the rest of
our
MSVC code, which meant we needed to produce COFF output that
the MSVC
linker accepts. Walter implemented DMD-Win64 with these
requirements
in mind.
PS4 should be easier using LDC, but I don't know if Sony would
take
issue with this. I expect them to take less issue than MS, so
I'd give
good odd's that they'd be fine with it.
Short answer, D works on modern consoles just fine, and there
were no
political blocks for us. GC is a demonstrated problem; avoid
it. DMD's
codegen is also a problem; it uses x87 to perform operations,
despite
the fact the x64 ABI uses SSE regs for float passing. That
results in
a lot of register switching, and poor float performance as a
result.
As an (awkward) workaround, you can use explicit SSE intrinsics
to
keep working in XMM, but I haven't tested the optimiser's
quality in
that case, and the std library obviously doesn't do that.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Sounds like the only thing
holding D back is someone putting in the effort to integrate it
with the console runtime and APIs. It's not going to be me, as I
haven't owned a console or even played a console game in a
decade. Yes, I know I'm an old fogey. :)
