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

[JN]

On Saturday, 27 January 2018 at 18:18:02 UTC, Dgame wrote:
One of our programmers use
> VIM too, but on a regular basis he has problems like 
> finding/renaming files/variables or optimize imports or code 
> formatting. I bet you can do that with the right tools and a 
> lot of time as good as an IDE can do it, but the IDE can do 
> that out of the box without consuming your time. It's like I 
> said - if you mainly used VIM/Emacs you think everything is 
> fine and would not try an IDE - but that's not what nowadays 
> happens to new programmers. And to make D appealing to them, D 
> has to offer good IDE support or it will remain as a hobby 
> language with very few exceptions.

I think it depends on what we consider good IDE support. We can 
use C++ as baseline, so syntax highlighting, code completion and 
debugging. Or we can take it a level higher, and go into Java/C# 
territory, with stuff like automatic variable renaming across the 
entire project, extracting fields into class etc.

While I think D IDEs, when they work, aren't that much behind C++ 
IDEs (never really tried debugging D though), but they don't 
really have a chance with Java/C# IDEs and probably never will. 
Given how dynamic D can be with CTFE/mixins, you can't do the 
kind of safe refactoring that those IDEs allow. The same applies 
to C++, Rust, and probably Go as well.