The One With D

Making the Move to D

When I first started following D, it was out of curiosity. When I started Derelict (which turned 3 years old last Friday, by the way — Happy Birthday, Derelict!), I did so with the goal of one day using it for my own personal projects. At the time, however, I was reluctant to start using D for anything else. Even after I started this blog over a year ago, I still was hesitant to pick up D for any production code. I toyed around with simple programs for some Derelict tests, or to try out new language features, but nothing more. Even while I was evangelizing D in other forums and communities, I was waiting for the ‘right moment’ to start using it on a serious project myself.

For a long while now I’ve been working sporadically on a commercial game project using C. Progress has been slow primarily because I only spend a few hours a week working on it (if that). But there have been other speed bumps along the way, things that any C developer worth his salt will have encountered more often than he would like (as an example, I spent three days chasing down a memory corruption bug not too long ago). I love C, with all of its foibles and weaknesses, but there certainly are days when I feel like throwing my computer out of the window.

Not too long ago, with one of the more recent DMD releases, I started to get this nagging feeling that the time for D had arrived. The more I ignored it, the stronger it got. Seeing in the NG those glowing reviews by the team0xf guys made it stronger still. So I decided to put it to the test on something other than Derelict and more than just a 10 minute test case. I quickly came up with a project idea and got to work.

After a several hours scattered over 2 days, I’ve already made great progress. Derelict requires only a small subset of D features, so though I’ve been aware of the benefits of using many of them, I’ve not actually seen any in production code until now. The more D I use on this project, the more I never want to see a line of C code again. In fact, I’ve already come to two decisions. For one, I’m going to move this test project forward into a production library. Second, I’m going to drop the C game project completely. I’ll eventually start over using D (it may seem to others like a waste of months of effort, but it’s really not a big deal). Before that, though, this new project has given me a couple of other ideas to work on.

Yeah, I’m going all out on this. I’ve typed up design documents, set up milestones and tasks on my local copy of activeCollab, and I actually sat down and blocked off large chunks of time on my calendar for development. My game business has been something that I wanted to get up and running sometime in the next few years (i.e., no solid plan), but now the worm has turned and I’m focusing on it exclusively. I’ll continue teaching English, but I’m going to stop taking contract software development work completely. Contract work was the real time killer for me and it’s never been something I really enjoy (mostly J2EE stuff). There are a few other minor distractions I’m cutting out as well. From here on, I’ll consider myself a full time D game programmer!

There are two side-effects. The first is that I’ll be able to set aside more time to work on Derelict than I ever have been able to before. Since I’ll now be a Derelict user myself, I’ll get to see first-hand any warts that crop up (at least, on a subset of the packages). The second is that the little test project that started this enlightenment will be made publicly available under a BSD license.

The point of this post is to proclaim to the world that D has set me free! My old reluctance to use it for production code was warranted way back when, but I can see no justifiable reason not to use D in its current state. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun typing code into a text editor. Thanks, Walter, for bringing D to where it is today.

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