Dscanner - DCD - Dfix ... Editor support or the lack of it.

[Johannes Loher]

On Thursday, 25 January 2018 at 15:20:15 UTC, Benny wrote:
> Maybe things work great in a few very specific editor but in my 
> personal experience, D its editor support is non stop 
> frustrating. And i suspect that this complaint is not new.

Indeed, this complaint is not new. Because the complaint is 
actually so common, I'd like to share my own experience:

I tried several different solutions, including the IntelliJ 
plugin, Mono-D, Sublimetext with a D-plugin, dlangide and vs code 
with code-d. With most of them, I had some problems, but in the 
end, I got all of them working. I had the least problems with 
code-d (the serve-d variant), which works perfectly after setting 
the stdlibPath in the settings (provided you already have 
dscanner and dfmt installed on your system and in your PATH). 
This what also what I've settled for in the end.

In my opinion the features offered by it are actually quite good: 
The autocompletion provided by dcd is more than enough for my 
needs and in addition to that you get static linting, code 
formating, debugging (if you also install the native debug plugin 
from the same author) goto definition and some more features. And 
in my experience this all works without major issues. Sure, you 
don't get autocompletion for ufcs calls, but that is actually 
quite difficult to implement...

Take this all with a grain of salt: I have only tested this on 
Linux and OS X, I have no clue about the situation on Windows.

But at least my experience was really good, so I'd like to use 
this opportunity to thank all the authors of the plugins and the 
underlying tools for doing this (ungrateful) work (and in my 
opinion doing it very well). I know that probably a lot has still 
to be done, but the state of affairs is not as bad as all the 
complaints make it sounds.

The reasons for the problems you describe still being so common 
have already explained thoroughly by others: Its mainly that 
there are no paid developers working on it and therefore not 
enough people working on it. So the solution is actullay quite 
simple and it is the same answer that most complaints about 
problems with D get: Either do it yourself, or pay somebody to do 
it. That is the quickest way to fix things.