Input from a newbie

[Jonas]

Hello D community! :-)

I was looking for a sane, object-oriented, 
possible-to-go-low-level programming language, so I decided to 
give D a try today.

Here's some feedback on the things I had/have trouble with. I 
hope some of this may be valuable for you.

1) First off, I really couldn't figure out were I was supposed to 
post this sort of message.  Apparently there aren't any mailing 
lists (a la Google groups) for D?

2) I couldn't find any good documentation on the build process 
and tools I'm supposed to use. Do you guys use standard 
Makefiles? Do you have your own build system? Would be really 
helpful if that was covered on the website.

3) While your error messages are a lot better than GCCs (gives 
you more context, hints about how the compiler interpreted your 
buggy program, etc) it wouldn't hurt if you made them a bit more 
graphical using colors and markers and such (LLVM like).

4) What's the difference between `... foo(MyObject obj) { ... }` 
and `foo(MyObject* obj)`? What are use cases for explicit 
pointers when passing objects? That's not covered in the 
documentation AFAIT.

5) What's wrong with this program? Is it that `printf` doesn't 
understand D strings? If so, how do I use D strings in string 
formatting?

import std.stdio;

string foo() { return "foobar"; }

int main() {
   printf("%s\n", foo());
   return 0;
}


Jonas