My first experience as a D Newbie

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 10/13/17 2:58 AM, Peter R wrote:
> Replying to a couple of the comments here
> 
> "I don't know if it's a different expectation or a different mindset or 
> something else."
> I'd like to think I'm fairly knowledgeable, but Yes, I expect 
> installing/configuring to be easy and quick, so I can get to the actual 
> programming. I expect solid debugging capabilities, full IDE support, 
> autocomplete, and 64-bit windows libraries. It is just some of the 
> things that I am used to with Visual C++. "Better than C++" is my 
> motivation to evaluate D, and to me that goes beyond just the language 
> and standard library.
> If I, as a new user, don't have a solid first impression, I'd have no 
> expectation that the rest of the D ecosystem is polished, and I would 
> return to C++

Thanks for replying. I did not mean my post as a slight against your 
knowledge, but really about my ignorance -- I don't know what the 
expectations of a Windows user are. I think the Windows users we do have 
on the core team (Walter being the main one) probably aren't typical 
Windows developers. But my experience seems to be most of the "I've 
tried to use D for 10 days and it sucks!" rants come from the Windows 
side, and they are mostly about installation and IDE woes. On my mac, I 
just do "dvm install 2.076.0" and I'm up and running.

I think at some point, an actual company will pick up the maintenance of 
a good D IDE for windows, and will solve this problem. Unfortunately, we 
have to rely on volunteers right now, and that company hasn't materialized.

One note about your requirements, auto-completion I think is something 
that I love about IDEs for other languages (I would be lost in xcode 
without it) and is something I've never used with D (all my attempts 
have been disasters). It's definitely something we need to improve the 
experience on.

-Steve