D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

[Timon Gehr]

On 05/11/2012 07:39 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> The author of a D based PSP emulator just rewrote
> the emulator in C#, after being disappointed with D.
>
> https://github.com/soywiz/cspspemu
>
> The reasons are listed here,
>
> https://github.com/soywiz/cspspemu#created-after-4-tries
>
> --
> Paulo

Well, those are not reasons for me.

 > The lack of a good IDE,

Properties of a 'good IDE', as I see it:

some essential properties:
- starts up instantaneously
- uses the screen space efficiently
- supports editing text efficiently
- accepts keyboard input as given by the user.
- reasonable support for auto-indentation
- supports searching the code for some text efficiently
- keeps all code _readable_, especially the one that has been written 
recently
- pattern recognition based code completion

- ... by default!

some 'nice to have' properties:
- code analysis based code completion
- navigate-to-declaration
- for those languages that require it: automatic generation of boilerplate.
- integrated debugger
- useful refactoring tools
- visualization of compilation errors (but please don't nag me)
- actual support for detecting semantic errors as they happen (extremely 
difficult to do properly)
- any other argument that is commonly used to advertise IDEs

- ... _responsive_ on halfway recent hardware!

some anti-features:
- splash screen
- cannot run code if there is no 'project/solution file'
- sometimes messes up those files
- build fails - restart IDE - build works
- fancy GUI
- requires pointing device
- accidental hit of obscure keyboard combination ...
   => permanent, extremely annoying configuration change
   => no way to tell what happened
   => no undo operation
- termination of the debugged program kills the output console


As long as IDEs fail to satisfy every single point in the 'essential' 
category and strive to have all of the stated anti-features, they don't 
have much value for me anyway.

 > the complicated structure of the D language,

Cannot really comment on that, I think getting work done in D is simple, 
and with DMD, just slightly harder than that.

 > the horrible compilation times,

wat? The so-fast-I-could-not-grab-a-coffee-during-compilation kind of 
horrible? Otherwise he might have hit a bug there.

 > caused that it taked too much time for everything, and made it
 > impossible to refactoring the code without days or weeks of work.

I'd have to know what kind of refactorings he carried out to be able to 
comment on this.