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.
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