Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2013 17:46:15 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 12:40:00PM +0200, Dicebot wrote:
> > Was pretty happy with vim, grep, gdb and makefiles on Linux. Anyway,
> > key problem (as far as I can see) here is that few of D developers
> > have both experience and personal interest in any IDE/Windows focus
> > as well as related tool stack. D has some nice flavor of anarchy -
> > both like it and consider it a problem.
> 
> The thing is, we keep hearing complaints about how D IDE integration
> is bad, etc., but it seems like not many people are willing to do
> something about it. What we need is somebody who is (1) dedicated to
> D, (2) dedicated to making IDE integration for D work nicely, (3)
> produce lots of code to make it work.
> 
> Forcing people to change the way to work on D just so you can have IDE
> integration probably won't have much of an effect. For instance, I
> wouldn't touch an IDE with a 10-foot pole. Will I still contribute to
> D? Sure. Will I do something about IDE integration because everyone
> complains about it? Unlikely. Will I be glad if somebody steps up and
> say, here's what I've been doing to make D IDE integration better? I'd
> fully support it. The question is whether there is such a somebody. :)
> 

Yea, that's what I've noticed too, and I've been kinda biting my
tongue on it since this thread started. For all the people who complain
about their unhappyness with D's IDEs, it's telling how few of them
find it important enough to actually *work* on instead of merely
complain.

I found some RDMD issues that were blocking me, so I fixed them. I
wanted Windows support for DVM, so I added it. I found the zip-creating
process to be problematic, so I'm doing something about it (even though
it turned out to be bigger than I'd anticipated). Not to say that IDE
stuff isn't a much bigger job than those, but come on, we've got what,
one person on Visual-D, one on Mono-D, and one who *used* to do XCode-D
but gave up because (and I sympathize) he seemed to be the only one who
cared enough to tackle it? Surly *something* could be contributed if it
really is as big of a problem as people say (and I'm not doubting that
it is).

Sure there's the matter of "I just don't have time", but frankly *none*
of us do. I know I sure as hell don't and yet I *make* the time anyway
because it's an important and worthwhile investment for me. And look at
Andrei - he's been was one of the top contributors and leaders and
he did so even while he was working on a PhD *in addition* to a full
time job and a new family. "Don't have time" doesn't count because its
true for all of us.

It just makes IDE users sound like spoiled "gimme gimme gimme", and I'm
certainly not going to claim they are, but I just want to point out
that's the impression that tends to come across. There's plenty of
other areas D's needed improvement, and those people who actually cared
have stepped up to the plate - so why aren't (for the most part) those
who want IDE improvements? (Naturally I greatly applaud the efforts of
the few IDE leaders we do have and have had in the past.)