Interested in being abreast of the GSoC 2012 projects? Here's how

[Andrew Wiley]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Denis Shelomovskij <
verylonglogin.reg at gmail.com> wrote:

> 21.05.2012 2:01, Andrei Alexandrescu написал:
>
>  As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore
>> coding starts tomorrow:
>>
>> 1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
>> 2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
>>
>
> Yes, lets accept D failure in writing anything as complicated as IDE and
> glorify C#!
>
>
Gee, thanks for your enthusiastic support for GSOC projects that will
greatly forward the D ecosystem.

Ultimately, what's useful to the D community (for reasons discussed in
these NGs many times over) is that we have working, mature, feature-rich
IDEs. The languages they're implemented in are mostly irrelevant, and in
MonoDevelop's case, trying to add language support via a plugin written in
D to an IDE written in C# would be silly. Would you extend Eclipse in C++?
It just doesn't make any sense at all.

What's more, building tools for D in languages other than D can be
extremely useful. Every time a discussion for a D compiler written in D
comes up, no one really likes to mention the benefits we've gotten from
having a compiler written in C++:
 - there are no bootstrapping problems because C++ exists on basically
every platform D would ever want to target
 - GDC and LDC were built without reimplementing the entire compiler and
exist on platforms DMD doesn't support
 - GDC can be formally added to GCC without the aforementioned
reimplementation of the compiler

There's no shame in building off solid technologies, even if those
technologies have no direct link to the D ecosystem. Building IDEs in D
does demonstrate that D is powerful and useful, but except for Rainer
Schuetze and Visual D (which actually /is/ written in D), D has not been
the right tool for the job for reasons that have little to do with the
language's actual merits.

The response at this point is generally, "Why build off
MonoDevelop/Eclipse/VisualStudio when you could build from scratch?" and
again, the question is whether building from scratch makes sense. Existing
frameworks exist, are very powerful, are already familiar to many
developers, and are generally easier to build on. There's certainly nothing
stopping anyone from working from scratch, but building from an existing
framework will get faster results and all the aforementioned benefits. If
the heap of abandoned incomplete IDE-from-scratch projects on DSource says
anything, it says that fast results are important in community-driven
projects.

I, for one, look forward to seeing what Alex can build this summer. Best of
luck as you start your project.

Andrew
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