D on Visual Studio?

[Robert Fraser]

Martin Fuchs Wrote:

> "kmd" <KeeperMustDie at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:fc6kmu$gh$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > Thanks, I'll check it. Still I wish that D would fully work on VS. It can
> > improve D language popularity greatly. I think D really good language
> > but I using only VS as editor.
> 
> What is really missing for D to become usable in bigger projects is
> an integrated development environment with a working debugger.
> 
> This is what I understand by a *working* integrated debugger:
> 
> a.) You should be able to set breakpoints directly in the source code,
>   halt the program at this breakpoints, step into the debugee, set new
>   breakpoints, etc. All a sensible debugger is able to do.  ;-)
>   This is currently partly possible with the VC++ IDE, as it can read in the
>   debugging info of the D compiler in OMF format (same as with windbg).
>   However it seems, this doesn't work all times. Setting breakpoints in an 
> IDE
>   may also be possible with GDB based debuggers on Linux if using GDC,
>   however I didn't try this yet.
> 
> b.) You should be able to display the current values of all variables in a
>   debugged program. This debugging info is not complete or  can not
>   displayed completely within the debuggers - I am not sure what's all 
> missing
>   here. But this is an important point, which makes debugger sessions for
>   D programs *useless* todays, because you can only see simple variables
>   like e.g. that if type "int". And who wants to start development if he
>   can't find and fix bugs in a convenient way? Inserting printf calls to
>   display the current variables can't be the solution.
> 
> So who will extend D debugging info and/or starts a project for extending
> an IDE like Visual Studio to be able to overcome the current shortcomings?!
> 
> Regards,
> 
>    Martin 
> 

Not to advertise or anything, but such an IDE does exist: http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent . In fact, I think some of the other IDEs (Code::Blocks or Poseidon, maybe?) have those features, too.