Is the D community lacking development tools?

[Sean Kelly]

On May 22, 2012, at 10:05 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 09:55:14AM -0700, Sean Kelly wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> It depends on the platform. GDB works fine on Linux, but is pretty
>> much broken on OSX. Does Visual Studio work on Windows? Because that
>> standalone debugger bundled with DMD is garbage. 
> 
> People will probably laugh at me, but over the years, I've found that
> well-placed printfs/writelns are much more effective in locating bugs
> than stepping through code with a debugger. Or inserting deliberate
> infinite loops at suspected problem spots and then using kill -11 to get
> a stacktrace.

I think a lot of this depends on the type of app.  Interactive debugging can be impractical for server apps, but is often easy for desktop apps.  Either way, I don't think anyone can say that debugger support isn't important for D in general :-)