Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-09-01 04:05, Manu wrote:

> 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.

Was this only on Windows or were there problems on Linux/Mac OS X as well?

> 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).

I can understand that.

> 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 not left guessing which ones are good/bad/out of date/actually work/etc.

I completely agree.

> Obviously, we settled on Visual-D (Windows) and Mono-D (OSX/Linux); the
> only realistic choices available.

There's also DDT with Eclipse. It supports auto completion, go to 
definition, has an outline view and so on.

> The OSX user would have preferred an  XCode integration.

This one is a bit problematic since Xcode doesn't officially supports 
plugins. But it's still possible, as been shown by Michel Fortin with 
his D for Xcode plugin.

> 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.

Sounds like you want an outline view in the IDE. This is supported by 
DDT in Eclipse. Even TextMate on Mac OS X has a form of outline view.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg