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Ares or Phobos?

 
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sonicbhoc



Joined: 05 Sep 2006
Posts: 11

PostPosted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 7:45 pm    Post subject: Ares or Phobos? Reply with quote

I'm new to programming in D (as you could probably tell by my postcount) so, which one should I use? I want to start programming games. I have a moderate amount of experience in Visual Basic (it does everything for you <_< ) and some in Java (I made a virtual store). So, which one should I use?
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sean



Joined: 24 Jun 2004
Posts: 609
Location: Bay Area, CA

PostPosted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 9:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It really depends on what your goal is. Ares has far fewer user-level features than Phobos, so at the moment if you plan to use Ares for "normal" work, you may want to also use Mango for its IO and other facilities. I also haven't been maintaining Ares very diligently lately, so it may not be as up to date as Phobos with recent DMD fixes. That said, I have been considering an Ares redesign that will address most of its current deficiencies, so stay tuned.

By the way, if you decide to try out Ares and run into a snag, please post here and I'll look into it.
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sonicbhoc



Joined: 05 Sep 2006
Posts: 11

PostPosted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I want to start programming games... Kinda like what Kenta Cho did with D (see rrootage).
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pragma



Joined: 28 May 2004
Posts: 607
Location: Washington, DC

PostPosted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sonic:

Ares is going to leave you with a smaller .exe footprint, and arguably a better library design than phobos. Sean has put a lot of effort into making it more sound for multithreading than phobos - the Atomic module is a great example of this.

IMO, Ares is also likely to be the staging point for other low-level enhancements by the community; last I checked, Sean was faster at responding to library contributions than Walter. This may be a strategic value that you might need for your project - provided you plan on maintaining it over the next few years.

Do heed Sean's word about Mango - it's an awesome I/O library, and was made to dovetail in with Ares. I don't think SDL has file I/O, so you'll Mango for at least that.

The downsides? Well, Ares is still largely a work in progress and I'm not sure how well other projects play with it. If you're looking to use Derelict or any other libs out there, I'd quiz the project authors to see how compatible they are with Ares. As Mango+Ares covers about 95? of what phobos does*, it's really just a matter of sheer effort to adapt a non-Ares compatible lib - this may be time you can't afford to loose.

(* no mangle, regexp or zip support last I checked)
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