Just starting out

[Sean Kelly]

On Oct 12, 2011, at 4:43 PM, J Arrizza wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm just starting out in D, read the book, tried a Hello World, and wrote a few unit tests. I'm ready for the next step.
> 
> I'd like to begin writing some more complex D code which I want to use not only as a test bed to investigate D itself to a deeper level but if it's successful to eventually use it as the beginnings of a toolkit for our internal use.
> 
> I'm looking for some recommendations from folks with lots of experience in D:
> 
> 1) Which to use: Phobos, Tango, or Tangobos? It makes sense for us to use D2 so this seems to preclude Tango for now. Correct?

Correct.  And Tangobos is just D1 Phobos modified to run on Tango, so it recluses that as well.


> Are there plans to merge or standardize on one of these? Phobos and Tango seem to be incompatible with each other at this point. 

One reason Druntime was created as a standalone library was to allow compatibility with Tango.  It is effectively the Tango runtime (at the time of Druntime's creation) re-branded.  The idea was that for D2, both Phobos and Tango could run atop the same runtime library, thus eliminating the compatibility problem.  No D2 version of Tango was ever shipped however, so that idea never came to fruition.

> My worry here is if we choose the wrong underlying library we end up having to re-write a lot of code later on.

If you're using D1 I suggest Tango.  If D2 then Phobos.  At this point I wouldn't start a new project on D1 with the intention of moving to D2 eventually, as the divergence has really become too great to make the transition worthwhile.


> 2) Which compiler? DMD, GDC or something else?  We use Ubuntu 10.04, 64 bit as our development platform. I'm assuming the gc is in all the D compilers.

DMD is obviously the popular choice, but GDC has gotten quite close recently in terms of language support and such.  I believe LDC is fairly close as well.  The libraries are effectively the same for all three, so the choice is really among compilers only.


> 3) DDT (eclipse plugin) seems relatively green. Any other suggestions for an IDE. Not a big deal for us, but it's nice to have source formatting. The DDT folks indicated that that feature is a long way off for them.

I like both UltraEdit and SublimeText2.  SublimeText has support for D out of the box, while you'll have to plug it into UltraEdit.  Neither have much in the way of debugger support, though.