Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Sat Aug 31 19:05:39 PDT 2013


We have to get the user experience and first impressions under control...

I'd really love to to see a general roadmap and list of priorities. Even if
goals are high-level, they might help direct focus?

So I had another game-jam this weekend with a bunch of friends who are all
industry professionals.
The point of a 48 hour game jam is to prioritise productivity and
creativity.
Choosing a language like D here makes sense from a productivity point of
view... that is, if it 'JUST WORKS'™.

There were 7 programmers, they were all using D for the first time (except
me).

Most running windows, one on OSX, one on Linux.
We ran into the same problems old that have been giving me the shits as
long as I've been using D.

Configuring compilers:

Naturally, this is primarily a problem with the windows experience, but
it's so frustrating that it is STILL a problem... how many years later?
People don't want to 'do work' to install a piece of software. Rather, they
expect it to 'just work'. We lost about 6 hours trying to get everyone's
machines working properly.
In the context of a 48 hour game jam, that's a terrible sign! I just kept
promising people that it would save time overall... which I wish were true.

The only compiler you can realistically use productively in windows is
DMD-Win64, and that doesn't work out of the box.
We needed to mess with sc.ini for quite some time to get the stars aligned
such that it would actually compile and find the linker+libs.

Walter: DMD needs to internally detect installations of various versions of
VisualStudio, and either 'just work', or amend sc.ini on its own. Or the
installer needs to amend sc.ini. Either way, leaving it to a user to fiddle
with an ini file just isn't acceptable. We had to google solutions to this
problem, and even then, we had trouble with the paths we added to sc.ini;
are spaces acceptable? Do they have quites around them?...
I might also suggest that Microsoft supplied (ie, 'standard'), libraries
should be automatically detected and path entries added in there too:
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\...
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)\...
These are on basically every windows developers machine, and each of us had
to configure them ourselves.


Getting a workable environment:

Unsurprisingly, the Linux user was the only person happy work with a
makefile. Everybody else wanted a comfortable IDE solution (and the linux
user would prefer it too).

!!!!!!!!!
This has to be given first-class attention!
I am completely and utterly sick of this problem. Don made a massive point
of it in his DConf talk, and I want to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-stress how
absolutely important this is.
!!!!!!!!!

I have come to the conclusion that treating IDE integration as ancillary
projects maintained by usually just one single member of the community has
absolutely failed.
I suggest:
 * These should be made central D community projects.
 * I think they should be hosted in the same github organisation as DMD.
 *** As many contributors as possible should be encouraged to work with
them every day.
   - Deprecate DMD makefiles. Seriously! Insist that contributors use the
IDE bindings to work on DMD.
   - The fact that you all laughed at the prior point suggests clearly why
it needs to be done. It will cease to be a problem when all the
druntime/phobos contributors are suffering the end-user experience.
 * They should receive bugs in the main github bug-tracker, so EVERY D
contributor can see them, and how many there are.

IDE integration absolutely needs to be considered a first class feature of
D.
I also suggest that the IDE integration downloads should be hosted on the
dlang download page so they are obvious and available to everyone without
having to go looking, and also as a statement that they are actually
endorsed by the dlanguage authorities. As an end-user, you're not left
guessing which ones are good/bad/out of date/actually work/etc.

Obviously, we settled on Visual-D (Windows) and Mono-D (OSX/Linux); the
only realistic choices available. The OSX user would have preferred an
XCode integration.

Overwhelmingly, the biggest complaint was a lack of symbolic information to
assist with auto-completion. Visual-D tries valiantly, but it falls quite
short of the mark.
This goes back to the threads where the IDE guys are writing their own
parsers, when really, DMD should be able to be built as a lib, with an API
designed for using DMD as a lib/plugin.
I think continuous code compilation for auto-completion and syntax
highlighting purposes should be a service offered and maintained by DMD.
That way it will evolve with the language, and anyone can use it without
reinventing the wheel.


Debugging:

Poor debugging experience wastes your time every 5 minutes.
I can only speak for the Windows experience (since we failed to get OSX
working); there are lots of problems with the debugging experience under
visual studio...
I haven't logged bugs yet, but I intend to.
There were many instances of people wasting their time chasing bugs in
random places when it was simply a case of the debugger lying about the
value of variables to them, and many more cases where the debugger simply
refused to produce values for some variables at all.
This is an unacceptable waste of programmers time, and again, really burned
us in a 48hour context.


Documentation:

Okay for the most part, but some windows dev's want a CHM that looks like
the typical Microsoft doc's people are used to. Those that aren't familiar
with the CHM viewer; it's just HTML but with a nice index + layout tree.


Containers:

The question came up multiple times; "I don't think this should be an
array... what containers can I use, and where are they?"...
Also, nobody could work out how to remove an arbitrary item from an array,
or an item from an AA by reference/value (only by key).

This code:
  foreach(i, item; array)
    if(item == itemToRemove)
      array = array[0..i] ~ array[i+1..$];
Got a rather 'negative' reaction from the audience to put it lightly...


Bugs:
Yes, we hit DMD bugs, like the one with opaque structs which required
extensive work-arounds.
  struct MyStruct;
  MyStruct*[] = new MyStruct*[n];

We also ran into some completely nonsense error messages, but I forgot to
log them, since we were working against the clock.


One more thing:
I'll just pick one language complaint from the weekend.
It is how quickly classes became disorganised and difficult to navigate
(like Java and C#).
We all wanted to ability to define class member functions outside the class
definition:
  class MyClass
  {
    void method();
  }

  void MyClass.method()
  {
    //...
  }

It definitely cost us time simply trying to understand the class layout
visually (ie, when IDE support is barely available).
You don't need to see the function bodies in the class definition, you want
to quickly see what a class has and does.


Conclusion:
I think this 48 hour jam approach is a good test for the language and it's
infrastructure. I encourage everybody to try it (ideally with a clean slate
computer).
The lesson is that we need to make this process smooth, since it mirrors
the first-experience of everybody new to D.
It also highlights and magnifies time-wasters that are equally unacceptable
in a commercial environment.

I don't think I made any converts this weekend wrt the above issues
encountered. I might have even just proved to them that they should indeed
stick with C# (the IDE's work!)... :(

Please, we need a road-map, we need to prioritise these most basic aspects
of the experience, and we need to do it soon.
I might re-iterate my feeling that external IDE integration projects should
be claimed by the community officially, and user experience + debugging
issues should be first-class issues in the main d language bug-tracker so
everybody can see them, and everybody is aware of the stats.
Also, the DMD front-end should be a lib offering auto-completion and syntax
hilighting data to clients.

I'm doing some more work on premake (a nice light buildsystem that
generated makefiles and project files for popular IDE's) to tightly
incorporate D into the various IDE's it supports.

</endrant>
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