Which tools do you miss in D?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2014-01-27 14:12, Manu wrote:
> On 27 January 2014 22:14, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com
> <mailto:doob at me.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 2014-01-27 09:11, Manu wrote:
>
>         In order:
>
>         1. A debugger (that works properly)
>         2. Go-to definition (that always works)
>         3. Auto-complete (that always works)
>
>
>     How well do these work for you in Visual Studio for C++? I'm finding
>     cases in Xcode where it doesn't always work, especially in DMD.
>
>
> The VC debugger is perfect for C/C++. I can't imagine how it would be
> improved. You can even edit your code and rebuild+relink while it's
> running to make minor runtime tweaks, and continue execution using the
> modified code.

Cool. I was mostly thinking of go-to definition and autocomplete. The 
debugger in Xcode has a couple of nice features as well. It support a 
bunch of value formatters, which are also customizable. Like if a value 
is an image (I assume NSImage) it will actually render the image.

> Go-to definition is not perfect, but it works 95% of the time.
> Auto-complete is very good in C/C++ but there are a few rough edges
> (possibly from complex preprocessor mess?),

Xcode has some problems with the DMD source code. It seems quite random, 
when go-to definition fails or resolves to the wrong symbol. But most of 
the time it works. I would assume it works even better for Objective-C.

> but C# is the clear benchmark for quality here.

Yeah, I remember Java in Eclipse. It's basically flawless.

> D doesn't have a preprocessor or a horrible network of text include, it
> should easily be able to match the C# experiences in general.

It does some other horrible things (from a source code analysis 
perspective, like template and string mixins.

> I say 'that always works' above, implying that it sometimes works...
> which is true, but it's in the realm of 30% for me, which is unreliable
> enough to be very annoying. Any time 'class' appears in D, it all goes
> south under VisualD.

I see.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg