dmd support for IDEs

[Nick Sabalausky]

"language_fan" <foo at bar.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:hav02v$2162$4 at digitalmars.com...
> Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:01:03 -0400, Nick Sabalausky thusly wrote:
>
>> "language_fan" <foo at bar.com.invalid> wrote in message
>> news:hasd5u$1fgu$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> Well since there is already a project working on an Eclipse plugin, I
>>> see little use for other IDEs at the moment. The D community is rather
>>> small and only a small amount of people are capable of developing and
>>> willing to donate their free time on free IDE development (commercial
>>> IDEs have small potential now that
>>> Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ/KDevelop/Visual Studio dominate the market).
>>> So why not concentrate on fixing the spec and fixing compiler bugs
>>> instead of building a modest IDE support no one will use?
>>
>> Any editor that is less responsive than notepad is useless to me, and
>> I'm far from alone on that. Thus, we don't go anywhere near Eclipse,
>> VS.NET, or anything along those lines (bunch of bloated garbage...and
>> probably designed to get developers to buy fancier hardware and thus end
>> up develop apps that require their users to buy fancier hardware).
>
> Fine, if you are happy with your productivity. For me it was a natural
> choice. I started with notepad like editors, then moved to "programmer's
> editors" like crimson editor and jedit, soon discovered vim and emacs,
> and finally have settled down on Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio, and
> IntelliJ IDEA.
...
> The productivity boost is enormous.
...
> Another killer
> feature is the "intellisense" stuff. Having the ability to see a)
> inferred type b) integrated html rendered javadoc c) type correct class
> members etc. saves me hours of work time per day. YMMV

I've used all that stuff before. I had to use Eclipse back when I was doing 
a little Java, and I did used VS.NET for C# in the early days (back then, 
VS.NET had most of those nice features, but wasn't nearly as bloated and 
sluggigh as it is today). So I'm very familiar with all of that stuff. In 
fact, I love all of it. But with things like Programmer's Notepad 2, I can 
actually get into a "flow" (which sluggishness instantly breaks) and I end 
up far *more* productive (as long as I'm not using some POS language like 
Java, see below).

> "Practical" languages
> have lots of boiler-plate, and I can easily generate hundreds of lines of
> code with a couple of key combinations or mouse clicks.

I disagree very much. For a puritanical anal-retentive language like Java, 
you *have* to have all that fancy stuff just to make the language even 
usable. But with a practical language like D, I have mixins, and I've gotten 
pretty good with regex find and replace, which obviously isn't as good, but 
it's good enough when dealing with any language that's at least somewhat 
sensible. With practical languages I never need to generate hundreds of 
lines of code. If I ever actually needed to do so (and in a way that an IDE 
could actually help with), I'd take that as a very big red flag that I was 
using an incredibly shitty language in the first place (like Java).

Also, Eclipse, even with descent, is still very Java-centric, particularly 
wrt project/target/workspace management, and that gets in the way. And VS 
just doesn't have any D stuff available at all and takes a lot of work, a 
lot of bad documentation, and IIRC, a paid version of VS, to add or use any 
support at all for a new langauge. PN2 has D syntax highlighting built-in, 
which already puts it well ahead of VS for D.