Is the D community lacking development tools?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 24 May 2012 at 19:16:57 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> 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 :-)

I find a debugger as very useful.

For me printf debugging always feel primitive from the time 
debuggers
didn't have nothing more than next/single step.

Now that the debuggers can provide so much visual information for 
data
structure navigation, postmortem debugging and REPL like features 
for
compiled languages, using plain printfs feels like stone age.

--
Paulo