June 12, 2026
Engine drama: DIY strikes back
I Stopped Fighting My Tools and Built a Game Engine in D
Fed up with game-making headaches, he built his own engine and the comments cheered him on
TLDR: A developer ditched a game-making tool that no longer fit his style and created his own engine in D instead. The small comment thread is overwhelmingly supportive, mixing proud hype with tongue-in-cheek jokes about being “totally not biased,” turning a niche coding post into a tiny rebellion story.
A game developer got so tired of wrestling with his old tools that he did the most dramatic programmer thing possible: he built a whole new game engine instead. In his post, he says making games had stopped being fun, especially as Godot—a popular free game-making platform—felt more and more focused on clicking around in an editor instead of writing code directly. So he went on a grand tour of programming languages, tried a bunch, and finally settled on D, which he says is fast, flexible, and mostly stays out of his way.
And the comment section? Tiny, but giving strong “main character energy”. D creator Walter Bright swooped in with what reads like a victory lap, highlighting the biggest selling points: one language for everything, speedy build times, freedom over memory use, and “C-like speed” without the usual misery. It’s basically the software version of a proud parent reposting your achievements. Then came Kapendev with a deadpan gem: “Good stuff. I say that as someone that is not biased.” Which, of course, is exactly the kind of extremely-online wink that makes a niche programming thread feel like a sitcom.
The hot take bubbling under this whole story is deliciously simple: when your tools start bossing you around, just leave and make your own. Is that practical for everyone? Absolutely not. Is it catnip for the build-it-yourself crowd? Completely. The mood is less “messy flame war” and more smug indie rebellion with a side of inside jokes.
Key Points
- •The article says the author moved from a Godot-based workflow to building a custom game engine in D called Parin.
- •The author reports trying Nim, Go, Zig, C, and D before selecting D for the engine project.
- •Parin is described as using one language for both game logic and scripting, with compile times under one second.
- •The engine is structured to avoid garbage collection by default and instead uses arena-based memory allocation cleared each frame.
- •The article explains compile-time-selectable static and dynamic data structures, including examples such as Arena, GrowingArena, ScopedArena, List, FixedList, and Grid.