One more question - an untapped audience.

[Mike Parker]

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 04:29:22 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:

> I don't know if I can express how strongly I disagree with that 
> sentiment. I don't use dub, I don't really want to use dub, and 
> I am virtually certain that the whole concept of using dub is a 
> going to make newbie acceptance much more difficult. D is 
> supposed to make life easier, not harder.
>
> DUB is great if you're an experienced linux dev. But for 
> somebody just getting started, especially those coming from 
> other languages with standard libraries (aka, all of them) the 
> idea of having to use a package manager to do anything is 
> completely backwards. We need to be reducing our project setup 
> times, not increasing them by making people download the same 
> 10 packages for every project they start. People want to 
> download a language and start writing code. Not faff about with 
> getting the right package configuration just to write some 
> output to the console.
>

You're greatly underestimating just how easy dub makes developing 
with D. I'm by no means a Linux dev. My life has been lived on 
Windows. But I use dub exclusively now and would love to see it 
packaged with DMD and become the de facto way to get D libraries. 
If Phobos were to be broken into a set of dub packages, even 
better.

Setting up a package.json for a new project is extremely easy. 
Once it's done you can copy it around for future projects with 
minor changes. Compilation, in its simplest form, then becomes:

dub build

And all the libraries you need are automatically pulled down. 
Then they are available for any other projects that need them. It 
doesn't get any easier than that.

Plus, once all of the D IDEs get support for it worked out, you 
then have one universal project configuration tool. No more need 
to provide build scripts, make files, Visual Studio solutions, 
MonoD projects, or whatever else. No matter your choice of text 
editor/IDE, one configuration file rules them all.

Ultimately, this would make it much, much easier to get started 
with D. So far, my experience in using dub with Derelict has 
suggested this to be true. I still get people asking for help 
with using Derelict 3 without dub, often because they don't know 
how to configure the import path or the linker in their IDE, or 
don't understand what it even means (and, apparently, have failed 
to read any documentation on the subject). I've gotten *zero* 
compile/link issues about building with dub. Maybe that just 
means the newbies aren't using dub, or that they aren't reporting 
their problems to me, but I suspect it's because dub is easy.