Which tools do you miss in D?

[Rikki Cattermole]

On Monday, 27 January 2014 at 08:24:07 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 27 January 2014 18:11, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In order:
>>
>> 1. A debugger (that works properly)
>> 2. Go-to definition (that always works)
>> 3. Auto-complete (that always works)
>> 4. Import management (missing/duplicate/unused imports)
>> 5. Typical suite of modern refactoring tools
>>
>
> I might add, the frequency to which I pine for these things is 
> in the order
> of minutes, perhaps even 10s of seconds >_<
>
> I made an interesting observation recently... D has kind of 
> ruined my
> career ;)
> Before I started using D a lot, I found C/C++ quite okay as a 
> language. But
> after extended time using D, I find C/C++ borderline 
> intolerable, and don't
> enjoy writing it at all.
> But the tooling built around C/C++ is pretty good, and as such, 
> I find the
> tooling while working in D borderline intolerable.
>
> So, before, I generally enjoyed my work, and felt generally 
> productive. Now
> days, whenever I do any work in either language, I find one 
> aspect or the
> other borderline intolerable, and I have trouble enjoying 
> spending my time
> programming for long periods before getting frustrated and 
> going and doing
> something else...
>
> I'm quite serious, this is a true realisation of an unconscious 
> behaviour.
> D ruined C/C++ for me, but my expectations of C/C++'s tooling 
> still remains
> a barrier to my enjoyment of writing D code all time time... 
> I'm fucked!

I'm personally of the opinion that if you're resorting to a 
debugger, that you really don't understand the code you're 
writing and how to debug it.
I've only really needed it in .net languages like c# and vb.net. 
Note my first language was vb.net 7 odd years ago. And I was 
doing c# up to a couple months ago in a course for my degree. I 
have only used one once or twice for e.g. assembly which I don't 
truly understand.

Its strange for me to see people use it so much. Because its such 
a different approach.

So for me auto completion and refactoring is most important. 
Mono-D is quite close for auto completion but it needs to get a 
lot more stable before I'll be happy.

I would also like to point out that for a long time we didn't 
really have a standard build manager. I was designing my own 
based upon Maven when dub came along.

So I'm happy with the way the ecosystem is going for this.