Book Image

Learning D

By : Michael Parker
Book Image

Learning D

By: Michael Parker

Overview of this book

D is a modern programming language that is both powerful and efficient. It combines multiple paradigms in a way that opens up a whole new world of software design. It is used to develop both desktop and web applications, with future targets including mobile, and is available on multiple platforms. It is familiar to anyone with some experience in one or more of the C-family languages. However, hidden in the similarities are several differences that can be surprising when trying to apply common idioms from other languages. When learning D on your own, this can make it more time-consuming to master. In order to make the most of the language and become an idiomatic D programmer, it’s necessary to learn how to think in D. This book familiarizes you with D from the ground up, with a heavy focus on helping you to avoid surprises so that you can take your D knowledge to the next level more quickly and painlessly. Your journey begins with a taste of the language and the basics of compiling D programs with DMD, the reference D compiler developed by Digital Mars, and DUB, a community-developed build utility and package manager. You then set out on an exploration of major language features. This begins with the fundamentals of D, including built-in types, conditionals, loops and all of the basic building-blocks of a D program, followed by an examination of D’s object-oriented programming support. You’ll learn how these features differ from languages you may already be familiar with. Next up are D’s compile-time features, such as Compile-Time Function Evaluation and conditional compilation, then generic programming with templates. After that, you’ll learn the more advanced features of ranges and functional pipeline programming. To enhance your D experience, you are next taken on a tour of the D ecosystem and learn how to make D interact with C. Finally, you get a look at D web development using the vibe.d project and the book closes with some handy advice on where to go next.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning D
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Game development with D


Chapter 8, Exploring the Wide World of D, introduced the Derelict and Diemos bindings projects. While Deimos includes bindings for C libraries that are useful for game development, Derelict was created with games in mind. Between them, you can find dynamic and/or static bindings for several C and C++ libraries that are commonly used in game development, such as:

  • SDL2: The Simple Directmedia Layer is a library that abstracts window and input handling on several platforms. It allows creating OpenGL-capable windows and ships with a hardware-accelerated 2D renderer that has backends for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Direct3D. It is available at http://libsdl.org/.

  • SFML2: The Simple and Fast Multimedia Library is a C++ library similar to SDL2. It can be used solely to create OpenGL-enabled windows on mulitple platforms, but also ships with a 2D renderer built on top of OpenGL. Its home page is at http://www.sfml-dev.org/. There is an alternative static binding available at...