DMD - Windows

[Paulo Pinto]

Hi Manu,

nice to hear about your experience with C#.

I am a bit of half-insider in the game industry, being
a IGDA member for some years and also attended two
GDCE so far.

Several reasons have kept me from getting a job in the
industry, but I still follow what's happening quite closely.

 From what I know here in Europe, many studios have been slowly
migrating to C# for tools, and many that target mostly Windows
are also experimenting with it in their engines.

How does it look like from your side?

I think this is important to know, because in what concerns
game development, C# might eventually superseed C++, especially
with good quality AOT compilers. Not sure how good Mono's AOT
code quality is. From the public information C# is the default
language for the PlayStation VITA and the PlayStation Suite.

And game development is probably one of the few areas where D could get
an entry to.

--
Paulo


Am 07.01.2012 13:40, schrieb Manu:
> On 7 January 2012 08:40, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>
>     "Manu" <turkeyman at gmail.com <mailto: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
>     <http://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.