Just starting out

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-10-13 01:43, 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?

Most people will definitely say D2 and Phobos. I still think Tango is 
better and for the time being that means D1. I also think that some 
parts of D2 is not quite ready yet.

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

Yes, Tango and Phobos are incompatible. There are someone/a couple of 
people working on porting Tango to D2. I think that port will use 
druntime, meaning it will be compatible with Phobos.

> My worry here is if we choose the wrong underlying library we end up
> having to re-write a lot of code later on.
>
> 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 a good compiler for development. It's the fastest available D 
compiler (as far as I know). It's always up to date, LDC and GDC can be 
a release behind DMD. I don't know what's best for production. I usually 
hear people saying that LDC and GDC is better than DMD but I haven't 
done any benchmarking myself.

> 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.

There's an older plugin for Eclipse called Descent. It has source 
formatting and a couple of more nice and interesting features, like 
compile time debugging. I also shows both syntax and semantic errors 
(semantic errors are disable by default). I still uses this plugin but I 
can be quite slow and unfortunate it's not maintained anymore. I still 
recommend you take a look at it.

http://dsource.org/projects/descent

Otherwise I use TextMate on Mac OS X. There's also a similar application 
called E (text editor) available on Windows (in the works for Linux 
too). It's compatible with TextMate's bundles.

> Thanks,
> John
>


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg