D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, May 12, 2012 02:00:19 Timon Gehr wrote:
> 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.

I do have to say that I find it somewhat funny that this is your set of 
requirements for an IDEA and yet "integrated debugger" is in the "some 'nice 
to have' features" section. Doesn't an IDE _have_ to have an integrated 
debugger or it's only a code editor (since it lacks the whole integrated part 
of Integrated Development Environment).

- Jonathan M Davis