This is why I don't use D.

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 9/5/18 11:46 AM, Dennis wrote:
> On Wednesday, 5 September 2018 at 13:27:48 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> 3ddemo has one commit. In February 2016. I think it would be an 
>> amazing feat indeed if a project with one version builds for more than 
>> 2 years in any language.
> 
> This problem is not about 3ddemo. I can totally relate to the OP, when I 
> started learning D (we're talking April 2017 here) I tried many OpenGL 
> demos and GUI libraries. I like learning by example, so I tried a lot of 
> them on both Ubuntu and Windows. My success rate of building them was 
> below 20%, and even if it did succeed, it often still had deprecation 
> warnings, or linking errors when loading the required shared libraries, 
> or glitches like messed up text rendering. I would try to fix it myself, 
> but the error messages were not clear at all for a beginner and Googling 
> them yielded few results.

I should say, I have little experience with or understanding of building 
opengl stuff. My experience with trying stuff is that it's very finnicky 
about which libraries are installed or how the environment has to be 
properly set up.

Even after I got 3ddemo to compile, it didn't run, wouldn't open certain 
libraries.

So I think it would be nice if these experiences were better, but I 
don't know what the core D projects need to do here. My guess is that 
there is not a lot of manpower making proper easy-to-use 3d libraries.

> We're not even only talking about small unmaintained projects here: at 
> the time I tried it, Gtk-D was broken.[1] Out of frustration I carried 
> on in C# for a while, and guess what: the first best OpenTK demo I found 
> basically worked first try. Now I didn't give up on D, but I can totally 
> understand that others (like OP) don't have the patience to put up with 
> this.

I think Gtk-D has gotten a lot better (not my experience, but Tilix 
seems to be doing good with it) since then.

> While we can't force volunteers to keep their D projects up to date, we 
> could try to give some incentive by notifying them via code.dlang.org, 
> or give users information on what compiler / environment is required for 
> dub packages to build. It might prevent some new users from leaving D 
> out of frustration.

I think a "known good" configuration entry, even if it's manual, would 
be a good thing to add.

-Steve