Error reporting is terrible

[Xinok via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 3 September 2015 at 23:56:53 UTC, Prudence wrote:
> After being away from D and deciding to test the idea of 
> writing a commercial app in it, There were 2 big things that 
> have jumped out at me:
>
> 1. The setup is a much compared to most modern day compilers 
> and software. While VS is huge, obviously has a ton of money 
> behind it, it installs without much fanfare. When installing VS 
> you know that ones it's done after a few mins you can jump into 
> programming and actually get something done.

Can you elaborate? These days, I find setting up D on Windows or 
Linux quite easy.

> 2. The error messages in D are horrendous. They tend to be 
> terse, point to places where the error actually doesn't occur, 
> and almost always require one to loop up the error, if it's not 
> obvious. This is a waste of time for the programmer. Usually 
> the more complex code the more crypographic the errors are.

Again, specific examples would help. Often, when newcomers detail 
the trouble they encountered during their first experience with 
D, one or more people will get to work fixing or alleviating the 
specific issues they mention.

> 3. Since I use VS, I installed VD. It works up to a point. But 
> is so ill-integrated into VS that it makes me want to just jump 
> back into .NET.

Unfortunately, some features of D make tooling support difficult. 
In particular, CTFE combined with string mixins are extremely 
powerful but basically require a fully featured D interpreter to 
make any sense of them.