Blocking points for further D adoption

dalailambda via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Jun 30 15:48:44 PDT 2016


As someone who has recently chosen D for a major project (a 
game/engine), I can confidently say that the biggest distinction 
for me between getting start with D versus something like Go is 
developer tooling. For Go I installed Go, installed a go intellij 
plugin, which automatically installed gocode and I was up and 
running. For D I had to install DMD (and learn about all the 
different compilers)[0], install dub, install workspace-d, 
install visual studio code (because the visual studio plugin had 
a linking error), and then I could finally have a complete setup.

I think if dub were distributed with DMD, along with a utility to 
install global programs (that way a D plugin can just call `dub 
install workspace-d` or similar), it would make it very easy to 
get started with D.

For reference, Cargo (Rust's package manager) allows `cargo 
install` 
https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1200-cargo-install.md

[0] As much as the "reference compiler vs faster compiler" 
distinction, I feel like languages that have a single official 
compiler that you can use for development and production (e.g. 
Go/Rust) are much friendlier.


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