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

Jonathan M Davis newsgroup.d at jmdavisprog.com
Mon Jan 29 00:13:15 UTC 2018


On Sunday, January 28, 2018 15:06:49 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 09:02:36AM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via
> > It is true though that most of the core developers around here favor
> > editors like vim or emacs and would prefer to focus their efforts on
> > the language itself or libraries rather than on plugins for IDEs and
> > whatnot, which is part of why D's IDE support isn't as good as some
> > folks would like - the other big component being the lack of a company
> > paying for folks to work on IDE support. I think that in general,
> > that's how you end up with IDEs with first class support for a
> > language. Sometimes, volunteer work will get you there, but that
> > doesn't seem to be how it usually comes about - not from what I've
> > seen in other languages anyway.
>
> But the thing is, this is not a proprietary language where people are
> paid to do the grunt work.  It's unrealistic to expect that random
> volunteers in the internet would go out of their way to implement
> support for something they don't use themselves. *Somebody* among the
> IDE crowd has to step up to do the work of improving IDE support;
> otherwise no amount of complaints is going to change a thing.

True. If something is going to happen, someone has to step up - probably
multiple someones - and most of the folks who seem to be interested in
putting the time in to develop D libraries or tools don't seem to be
interested in IDE development. If more folks decide to put in the time and
effort, we may eventually get to where some of these folks who want better
IDE support want D's IDE support to be.

But part of my point is that good IDE support seems to be one of those
things that generally only happens when a company pays for it. That's not
always the same company who develops the language (if there even is a
company behind the language), but if no company pays for such development,
the odds are much, much lower that it's ever going to happen.

Either way, more folks need to put some time and/or money towards IDE
development for D, or the folks who want first class IDE support for D are
never going to have what they want.

Personally, I don't really care, because I have no interest in such support.
I have no problem if it gets implemented, and it probably is better for the
D community if we have better IDE support, but it wouldn't improve my life
any. If we're going to get improved tooling, I'd rather see more
improvements to stuff like dub than better IDE support. So, I generally
ignore the complaints about the lack of good IDE support. Either way, it's
not something that I'm going to spend time on. I have too much on my TODO
list already.

- Jonathan M Davis



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