What you use D for?

Jason House jason.james.house at gmail.com
Fri May 16 07:47:27 PDT 2008


Dave Wrote:

> 
> "Jason House" <jason.james.house at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:g0i5gi$sr2$1 at digitalmars.com...
> >I develop a multithreaded game-playing engine 
> >http://housebot.sourceforge.net
> > Of critical importance to me is debugger integration, multithreaded 
> > support, data visualization, full Tango compatibility, support for all gdc 
> > platforms, and integrated profiling and unit test coverage analysis. I 
> > could see spending $50 on something like that, but only if I know it will 
> > remain useful.
> >
> > An IDE stops being useful if I have to buy a new version with each D 
> > release, or is close in functionality to free alternatives.
> >
> 
> $50 for all that and a virtual life-time maintenance contract -- Wow, big 
> spender!

I don't expect life-time maintenance for free, but I also don't want to pay for an upgrade every time the DMD compiler changes.  That can happen on a weekly basis!  Visual studio runs $100-$200 and seems to release new versions every 2-3 years.  I don't think a D IDE can wait that long between new releases.



> Just because you give your software away doesn't mean the rest of us should 
> <g>


It more means that my D-based cash flow is limited ($0).  That then puts IDE's into the category of recreational spending.  I don't pay more than ~$50 for video games.  I'm sure the hobbyist's perspective is far different from that of copanies which'll pay top dollar to enhance the efficiency of their employees.



> This is a perfect example of how the open-source mentality stifles 
> innovation - small development organizations can't make a buck off of 
> software anymore, so why take the time to do it right ;)

You may be joking, but it's probably worth saying that open source raises the expected quality of commercial applications.  Right now, I can already get most functionality I want/need for free:
  IDE: emacs+d-mode or Eclipse+Descent
  Debugger: GDB (with demangling patch)
  Compiler: GDC or DMD
  Build System: make or dsss
(There are some other windows-only options too)

Do I mind having all of those pieces separate?  Not really.  Would I like having better integration between the tools?  Yes.

If those open source projects didn't exist, my need for an all-in-one IDE would be much higher.  This makes it tougher for a commercial company because their price is not measured against their feature set but rather the incremental features beyond what is available for free.  I also expect modern commercial applications to leverage existing open source products.  I think the original post talked about a commercial PLUGIN to eclipse.



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list