The D Programming Language for Game Development
Recently I've been bothered because I reached a point in which C++ (even 0x) felt very limited, so I started looking for alternatives.
Forget Java, C#, Python or Ruby. I still like the low-level nature of C++ and I'm not fond of virtual machines. Further, I'm a game engine developer, so I have to develop core routines which must be really fast, and lately I've been hungry for code expressiveness. C++ is an almost-there language for me, but there are many exceptions on how to use templates, and GCC isn't optimizing stuff as well as I'd hoped it would.
So I'm considering to start learning D.
Do you think it will suffice my needs as a game developer? I'm wary because I've never heard of D being used for that.
Thanks!
Answer
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.