Which tools do you miss in D?

[Manu]

On 27 January 2014 19:29, Rikki Cattermole <alphaglosined at gmail.com> 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.
>

That's one key point of a good debugger; when you don't understand the code
you're debugging at all, but you need to fix it, like, 3 hours ago.

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.
>

I obviously use many other techniques when a debugger isn't available, but
I don't know any in which I feel similarly as productive as with good
runtime debug and analysis tools.

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.
>

dub doesn't address my needs at all, but I've put crap loads of time/energy
into the D extension for premake, which works well (
https://bitbucket.org/premakeext), although for some reason has never
really gotten any attention from the D community :(

It generates cross-language build scripts (ie, C/C++ and D code all
together in the same project) for make and many popular IDE's.
I use it for large scale projects that involve C/C++ engine library, D
front end code, and other ancillary libraries bolted on the side.
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