Improving ddoc

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 1 January 2015 at 10:16:01 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> My point here was to give context for ddoc's history. FWIW 
> switching dlang and phobos now to doxygen would be a major 
> effort and I'm not sure we'd be in a better place even after 
> assuming perfect execution.

I don't think the current documentation of phobos is affecting 
(professional) D adoption much, although it can improve a lot. 
Adoption is a language/compiler/runtime/tooling issue.

On the other hand, if converting phobos' Ddoc into Doxygen cannot 
be automated, then that suggests that there is a fundamental 
problem with how Ddoc is used as a markup tool.

Adopting Doxygen would give you some benefits:

- it makes D look less weird

- it makes it easier to use existing formatting/presentation 
solutions

- it is more motivating to learn Doxygen than figuring out Ddoc 
since you can use it for non-D projects

The Doxygen front page advertises the following:

«it also supports other popular programming languages such as C, 
Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, IDL (Corba, Microsoft, and 
UNO/OpenOffice flavors), Fortran, VHDL, Tcl, and to some extent 
D.»

D would look better without the "to some extend" and you might 
get the Doxygen community to help out with Doxygen relevant 
tooling issues if it is the default D documentation tool. 
Basically an opportunity for synergy.