D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

Simen Kjaeraas simen.kjaras at gmail.com
Sun May 13 11:36:23 PDT 2012


On Sat, 12 May 2012 08:05:26 +0200, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org>  
wrote:

˙ʇsod-doʇ ʇou op ǝsɐǝlԀ
˙uʍop-ǝpısdn sı ʇsod ɹnoʎ ǝʞıl sɯǝǝs ʇı ʇnq 'noʎ ɯɹɐlɐ oʇ ʇoN

> Your 'nice to have' features are for my type of
> work 'must have' features, otherwise I could as
> well just use Notepad++.
>
> Having used GUI environments since the early MS-DOS
> days, I don't have any issue with my mouse friend. :)
>
> --
> Paulo
>
> Am 12.05.2012 02:00, schrieb 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.


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