Which tools do you miss in D?

mongrel sillymongrel at gmail.com
Mon Jan 27 02:22:38 PST 2014


On Monday, 27 January 2014 at 09:29:44 UTC, Rikki Cattermole 
wrote:
> 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.

I disagree. Your claim it might be true when:

1. *you* recently wrote the code (last 18 months)
2. your the code base is small < 50 000 LOC
3. You're single threaded.
4. You have no third-party dependencies/libraries.

But that has never been the case for me at work, only for 
personal stuff.

It is so much more efficient to track down problems with a good 
debugger. Good GDB support would be great ... I know it is being 
worked on so I'm happy :D

>
> 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 don't understand the reliance on IDEs around here. Is there 
something lacking in computer science education at uni nowadays?

Package managers are nice, dub rocks!.

I'd much prefer to see D devs working on improving ARM support 
and improving the GC. Again this is happening already so I cannot 
way to see where it goes.

Cheers.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list