DMD - Windows

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Sat Jan 7 04:40:20 PST 2012


On 7 January 2012 08:40, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "Manu" <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.144.1325892989.16222.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> >
> > Most windows programmers will simply not consider the
> > language until it is well supported in Visual Studio
> >
>
> Yea, and that's very unfortunate. I used to be a huge fan of visual studio
> for years (from around MSVC 5 through the first or second VS.NET), but now
> that I've tasted the alternatives, I find the build/project management to
> be
> a little too "magical" and proprietary (or at least too incompatible and
> inbred), and the UI to be too bloated. I think a lot of the people who are
> unwilling to try anything but a heavyweight IDE are being unfair to
> themselves and their projects by keeping themselves blinded. (Obviously, if
> they've done both ways and still prefer big IDE's, that's different.)
>

Your personal opinion of people who use and/or prefer visual studio is
irrelevant. Most windows devs use it, and love it. It's very important.

I for one am primarily a cross platform dev, NOT a windows/x86 dev, and I
still use and prefer VisualStudio.
I have worked extensively on these platforms: Dreamcast, PS2, XBox,
Gamecube, PS3, XBox360, Wii, PSP, NDS, iPhone, Android, Windows, and
Linux... plus some others on occasion in the last 10 years. I rarely work
on x86 platforms...
Unsurprisingly, almost every platform from that list above has reasonabe VS
integration. Console SDK's are almost all exclusively VS based (this might
be why most game devs use VS... perhaps a chicken/egg problem here, but
nobody's complaining about it. Only when the VS integration is
mediocre/half arsed to people complain...) .. Some older consoles tended to
tie themselves to CodeWarrior, but thankfully, that dwindled, and the same
platforms eventually adopted a VS integration due to demand. I've never
heard of anyone who PREFERS CodeWarrior.

What would you propose I try to convince me that VS is shit and
unproductive?

I do use build tools, like premake, which are able to produce VS projects
(and makefiles, etc, for non-windows platforms/toolchains and useful for
automated scripts)...
If you're going to talk about bloated heavy-weight IDE's, have you every
tried using Eclipse? What a joke! How is it that so many years of OSS dev
and Google backing it can produce such a bloated, crap, slow, inconsistent,
unfocused/unintegrated tool?!
How about XCode? I don't understand how anyone gets any work done with
XCode, it is just soooo crap.

So what are the alternatives? An endless mountain of annoying shell based
build systems? I use them when I need to, I like premake at the moment, and
have used others previously. It's an important part of the toolchain, but
it generally results in a VS project for actually doing productive work...
So there you go, another opinion for you, yet I believe mine is shared by
no small number of professional windows based devs ;)

And the thing is too, with popular overrated langauges like C++ or Java, you
> *need* a fancy IDE to get anywhere and still maintain sanity. But what many
> of those people don't get, is that with better languages, you *don't*
> actually *need* all that other stuff. Sure, it can still be a nice bonus,
> but it's *not* a necessity like with the popular "puzzle" languages they're
> used to. It's like canned vegetables: You've gotta drench that shit in
> salt,
> sauces, spices, and all sorts of stuff just to make it go down. But with
> food that's quality in the first place, it doesn't matter: You can either
> dress it up or leave it as-is; either way it still works
> fine...no...*better* than starting with an inferior base.
>

Overrated? I don't think calling industry standards overrated is a
reasonable claim. they're industry standards because everyone uses them...
and everyone uses them because they are industry standards.
I've used C/C++ professionally my whole career with some C# taking over for
tools recently. I hate C++! (that's why I'm here!).. I don't hype it up
like it's awesome, but I use it because it's industry standard, there is no
viable alternative, and even if there were, it would NEED integration with
all my tools before I could use it professionally in a full production
environment.

I don't NEED an IDE to work with those languages specifically, I *prefer*
an IDE to DO WORK FASTER... I prefer an IDE even when I'm writing python
for instance, and it annoys me that there's no IDE/debugger for embedded
LUA.

If by 'better' languages, you mean D, then I completely disagree. D *NEEDS*
an IDE, just like all the rest... and in my opinion, even more so... here
are some reasons I find it so annoying there isn't a quality VS integration
for D (yet):
  ** auto is used liberally in D... I should be able to hover over any
variable and have a tool tip inform me what it actually is (this makes it
more important that D has an IDE than even C/C++)
  ** I don't have years of experience with the libraries, I SHOULD be able
to press '.' and have a list of everything the library can do appear
instantly without wasting my time trawling through the docs.
  * I shouldn't have to guess or try and remember the name of some member
or method... I should be able to type the first 1-2 letters, and have the
rest of the word will appear instantly.
  * If I don't know what a type is, or want to know about it in more
detail, I should be able to press F1 and see documentation about the
class/function/whatever instantly.
  * I'm new to the syntax, and it's terribly nice when a little red
underline appears beneath a syntax error I've just created.
  * As projects grow, things like auto-refactor save sooo much time.
Extremely difficult to implement reliably for C/C++, but should work
perfectly in D...

C# for instance, is becoming very popular. The reason for this is that it's
just sooooo fucking productive, and that's not thanks to the language its
self... any C# user will agree that at least 50% of C#'s special power is
actually it's VS integration.
The first time I used C# (knowing absolutely nothing about the language), I
opened VS, and started typing... thanks to the integration, the language
was self-documenting and self-evident. I felt immediately productive in a
language I hadn't even read a word about, and after a little more
experience, I love its efficiency for writing the kind of code it's great
at, and I always feel amazingly productive. The experience is not limited,
or even thanks to the language, it's the whole package.

The C# experience gave me a new expectation from any new language... I
shouldn't need to KNOW a language, or basically anything about it to start
using it immediately. The IDE (auto-popup-documentation, code completion,
info tooltips, etc) is what gives me that experience. Assuming the rest of
the language and libraries are designed intuitively, it works.

The reason it matters so much to me...
I suspect I could actually propose using D in the office for small tasks,
tools, etc... everyone hates C++, it wouldn't be hard to convince them to
give it a try.
That said, If D doesn't have an IDE, or more specifically, VS integration,
it's off the table. Period. In a multi-user project, where all users expect
VS integration, I can't do without it.
If it can manage to make a splash with newcomers like C# does, people will
be really impressed, and they'll keep coming back.
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