Questions about D for a real project

[Robert Fraser]

BCS Wrote:
> 1. What is the state of the art in IDE’s for D? Code::Blocks? Eclipse+Decent?
> 
> 2. What stage are these in? Stable, approaching stability, active development, 
> in development but not very active? 

I can only answer with regards to Descent. As of Descent 0.5.1, it should be considered "stable" as in it will not hang or crash, but "alpha" in terms of functionality. Any functionality that requires semantic resolution (in particular, auto-complete and go-to-definition) may not work properly for all input (but should work fine for most :-)!). Semantic errors should be turned off for large projects, as there are significant problems with these. However, even if certain features do not work all the time, Eclipse will not crash, and the text editing capabilities and syntax error marking will always remain usable.

The supported features in Descent can be seen here:
http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent

It was designed from the ground-up for D support, so supports many more D-specific features than Code::Blocks does, and properly handles templates (to some degree). On the other hand it's written in Java, based on Eclipse and may be too "bloated" for people used to text editors or even Code::Blocks (it takes about 150MB worth of downloads to get it all up and running if you include the Java runtime).

Ary can probably answer further, especially on his plans for Descent's future. I'm hoping to have project building and unit testing support integrated in Descent by the next release, but it may be pushed back further.