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digitalmars.D - Re: BLADE 0.2Alpha: Vector operations with mixins, expression templates,

janderson Wrote:

 That would be nice and would help however I think it'll take more then 
 that to convince a Game company to switch to D, particularly ones using 
 XNA.

Umm... A runtime hosted microsoft product? For anything high performance, that's suicide! No wonder the games the last couple years have come out bloated to 8Gb.
 It would have to be a startup company that is not working 360, perhaps a 
 Nintendo, sony, Linux or perhaps windows.  I say perhaps, because if a 
 company is going to switch to anything its probably XNA.  Now if we had 
 D for Net, maybe the story would be slightly different.

Oh! DotNet? Another runtime hosted microsoft environment? Brilliant. I would hope you've suggested this is so *only* because programmers would want to target the XBox360. Anything running on Linux would *hugely* suffer performance running on DotNet compared to D; as would anything on the x86-64 platform - the performance hit would still be considerable on Windows, but nonetheless tolerable on modern computers.
 I do like the idea of using D for games, I just see it as being a hard 
 sell.  Scripting and tools are probably the main gateway for D into the 
 game programming world.

Well, with Walnut 2.x en route and Blade slowly evolving... I'd say that within the next year we ought to see a stupidly easy-to-edit scripting engine along with incredibly fast vector and floating point math. If someone eventually provides runtime AST reflection, we may soon thereafter see SSE2 and proveable security follow shortly thereafter.
 
 Once a few game companies start using it in their main project and can 
 demonstrate productivity/speed improvements then the wall may indeed 
 start to crumble.
 
 -Joel

That's probably a fair assessment.
Apr 10 2007