Show HN: Parin – A 2D game engine between raylib and Godot, written in Dlang | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Parin – A 2D game engine between raylib and Godot, written in Dlang

github.com

76 pointsKapendev19 comments

Please check this interview with Lewis Nicolle who created his own game engine with Dlang for his new game Art of Reflection, and why Dlang very much suitable for game engine development [1],[2].

[1] Why D Programming Language?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWQbYvPBTg

[2] Art of Reflection:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290770/The_Art_of_Reflec...

Parin is a 2D game engine I've been working on for about two years.

This is cool. Well done in the creation.

Your game showcase is also cool: https://kapendev.itch.io

Thanks!!

I've never been a big fan of D, but I also haven't done much with it so it's possible I would like it more if I did.

So, simple question: why D? Keep in mind that "I think it writes pretty code" is a perfectly valid answer.

I tried D after attending this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlVpPstLPEc

My impression was that it strives to be a better C++ by fixing many of the annoyances and providing some well thought out convenience features, and it did a pretty good job. I thought the multiple version features and being able to write unit tests inline was especially nice.

But D came about before C++11 was a thing, and C++11 was a great ergonomic improvement over C++98. Since C++ got better, I haven't been keeping up with D.

I like how easy it is to switch between low-level and high-level code, and it has some neat features for modeling data.

Every time I get excited to try a non C++ based language - Rust, Zig, D I am always reminded on how non-existent the mobile support is. Strictly from the standpoint of strong mobile support the only languages worth bothering with are C# and dart. Java and Swift are too tied to their platforms.

Is there a wasm-esque effort for mobile?

No idea. I weirdly want to use the Wasm target with some JS thingy to target mobile. Sounds like fun?

I might have misunderstood your statement but I use rust all the time with dart FFI in my apps.

There's a lot of interest in using Rust on mobile platforms, and it's definitely possible to write code in Rust that executes on mobile. I've personally been working on a mostly-rust project that effectively uses a Kotlin shim for the UI on Android, and this works surprisingly well and was less effort to get working than I expected it to be.

My bad, I completely forgot about Kotlin and Godot. Slint does seem promising same can't be said about Zig / D. When I mean supported it shouldn't feel hacky.

- C# by Unity and MAUI

- Flutter

- Qt

- Godot

- Kotlin

- JS

Personally I find my self sticking to Qt as the safest bet. Don't event get me started on VR support. Languages need to take Platform support seriously.

Agreed! I've been using Flutter + Rust (using https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge , which streamlines FFI bindings management). It's a joy to work with and run on all major desktop/mobile platforms with little effort, minus system APIs like win32.

Always excited to see something done with Dlang. I still think that language is underrated.

DMD needs to work on modern Macs. I am about to have a chat with Claude over how I can make that happen at this point, I have a feeling it will involve the LLVM D compiler, some assembly witchcraft for Apple Silicon and maybe some sort of bootstrapping method. I did toy with making Mojo work on Windows, but Max is proprietary so I can only use a tiny fraction of Mojo on Windows unfortunately.

A good chunk of the community uses LDC or GDC for that exact reason. I understand why Digital Mars wants to retain control of the core compiler, but they certainly need to work with the community if they can’t get solid support on a major platform.

Walter has been working on adding ARM64 support to DMD. I think he recently got Hello World running.

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