So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool and library support for my domain and other similar things and it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to the roof.

I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to have D as one of the possible scripting language?

I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting language for it would be very interesting at least on the educational point.

What do you think?

Joel Lamotte

On Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 14:21:43 UTC, Joel Lamotte wrote:
> So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool and library support for my domain and other similar things and it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to the roof.
>
> I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to have D as one of the possible scripting language?
>
> I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting language for it would be very interesting at least on the educational point.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Joel Lamotte

Although it would be nice, I think it would be an hard battle against C#, specially taking into consideration the amount of studios now making use of it.

--
Paulo

 Unity uses mono so any D compiler that could compile to pure CLI would be usable in Unity in theory

On Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 14:21:43 UTC, Joel Lamotte wrote:
> So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool and library support for my domain and other similar things and it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to the roof.
>
> I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to have D as one of the possible scripting language?
>
> I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting language for it would be very interesting at least on the educational point.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Joel Lamotte

I doubt the Unity3D team will have much interest in adapting D to their engine, unfortunately. It just isn't cost effective, there's no real benefit over C# for what Unity makes use of (besides possibly getting rid of the Mono dependency). I'm pretty sure Unity also makes use of C#'s runtime reflection capabilities to dynamically bind to script events and properties. D is mostly just as capable as C# with runtime reflection (to my knowledge), but you have to build out structures manually, and it's much more difficult.

A better idea would be to make a new Game Engine completely written in D, which also uses D for "scripts". You'd still need to build runtime reflection structures for anything like Unity's editor, though. I was playing around with D the other day with a similar motive, but I never really came up with a solution on how to dynamically bind a delegate to a "unknown" type's function.

Am 19.12.2012 17:45, schrieb DypthroposTheImposter:
>   Unity uses mono so any D compiler that could compile to pure CLI would
> be usable in Unity in theory

Yeah, but I was actually speaking about the language.

Since 2008, I have noticed here in Germany quite a few studios have migrated their tooling from MFC/C++ to either Qt/C++ or WindowsForms/WPF/C#.

Additionally most universities are now doing XNA and Unity based courses
in their game design courses.

And in the server side many are going C#, Java or even Erlang!

Sony is also using C# in their Playstation Mobile framework.

As a result, many are starting to feel comfortable to move from C++ to C#, if the type of game allows such decision.

So they would need to have a good reason to use D instead, even if it is available.

--
Paulo