Right now, what's the most important for the success and adoption of D?

Christopher Wright dhasenan at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 05:51:04 PDT 2007


Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> I wanted to probe the D community of the following issue:
> 
> Right now, what would the most important thing for the success and 
> adoption of D? In other words, if one had to use D to develop a medium 
> or large scale software, what would be the most important things to 
> have, that we currently don't have (or aren't good enough)?
> (I'm not talking only about language features, in case you didn't get that)

- Good TDD tools.
unittest {} is primitive. Thomas Kuehne's unittest walker is an 
improvement. I want a mocks library. (I tried writing one, but there's 
ICE on anonymous delegates with template parameters, and I haven't 
figured how to get around that.) I want an Assert library that can give 
better error messages:
int[] foo = [1, 2, 3];
int bar = 4;
Assert(foo, Contains(bar)); // error: expected to contain: 4 but was: 
[1, 2, 3]
Assert(foo, Is(bar)); // error: expected same as: 4 (0xdeadbeef) but 
was: [1, 2, 3] (0xfeedb00c)

That can be done without much trouble, but it's less important.

- A good GUI library.
I don't know what's out there that's production-ready. It should seem 
native to the language. MinWin is best in that regard, most likely.

- An enterprise library.
Specifically, it should support dependency injection and anonymous event 
hookup. Ideally, it would use some sort of decorator on events to decide 
whether to hook them up. I don't want to have to go to two separate 
places to maintain one event listener or publisher.

Other than that, using D is pleasure, so I have no requests.

> I ask this on the onset of seeing several people commenting on how they 
> can't wait until we have AST macros, or how the feature X would be 
> awesome to have, while me, now that I actually started to some coding in 
> D (even if in a very small project), would actually rate those a much 
> lower priority versus other things I'd like to have in the D ecosphere. 
>  I'll do some more comments on this but first I'd like to hear about 
> other people's opinions.

Right now, D lacks libraries. Half the people here are working on 
libraries of some sort. AST macros make their job easier.

Chris Wright.



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