D vs C++11

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, November 03, 2012 13:46:17 Erèbe wrote:
> Nearly no support in vim (my editor of choice)

What does vim do for D that it doesn't do for C/C++? Some plugins that you can 
use for C/C++ probably won't work for D, but vim itself should support D just 
as well as C/C++. vim is a power user level editor, not an IDE, so most of the 
types of features that really require understanding the language wouldn't be 
in vim anyway.

> Support should not be a top priority for the D-core now that the
> language is well featured ? Something coherent with what already
> exist (dmd) ?

The folks who work on the compiler and libraries are unlikely to be the same 
folks working on tools for D. Stuff that requires compiler support does get 
done by the compiler folks (e.g. providing debug symbols that gdb can use), 
but IDE stuff? That's not going to be done by the people working on the core 
language. It's generally a completely different set of people who end up 
working on that sort of stuff, and even without adding lots of new features to 
the language, there's still a lot for the core developers to be working on in 
terms of bug fixing or fleshing out the standard library. And D isn't adding 
features left and right. In fact, it's mostly feature frozen. So, that long 
list of features says nothing about the focus of the D community at this point 
as far as work goes. That just means that lots of work was done in the past.

The main focuses of the compiler folks at this point are compiler features 
which will help make D more fully usable (e.g. adding 64-bit support to 
Windows) and bug fixes. We're not adding much in the way of features to the 
language at all at this point. So, their focus is likely where it should be, 
aside perhaps from which bug in particular gets fixed first.

If you want better tools beyond the compiler, then other people need to write 
them. And other people _do_ write them. We have VisualD, Mono-D, etc. Maybe 
there aren't enough people working on that sort of thing, but work is 
definitely being done there.

But if you're looking for something like a fully-fledged IDE for D written 
completely in D, then you're going to have a very long time to wait, because 
that's the sort of thing that takes years and lots of people to write. And 
given that all there is that needs to be done for D, that's arguably a very 
poor use of time anyway, because solid plugins for IDEs like Ecilpse and 
Monodevelop will do the job just fine for the most part and require far less 
effort. Maybe we'll get it someday, but no time soon.

And other people are putting time and effort into other types of tools to 
improve D from the standpoint of tools (e.g. some work has been done on 
getting a package management tool for D similar to what some other languages 
have). So, work _is_ being done. It just takes time, and we arguably don't 
have enough people much of anywhere in the various areas of D development. So, 
pretty much everything is slower than we might like it to be. But it _is_ 
improving, and work is still getting done.

- Jonathan M Davis