Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Atila Neves]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 12:01:09 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-10-16 at 11:14 +0000, Atila Neves via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
>> What tooling what you like to see developed that doesn't exist 
>> now?
>
> A D plugin to CLion as good as the Rust plugin.

I'm not sure how many D users currently use CLion, would like to 
or willing to pay for it even if such a plugin existed.

I also don't know how different that is/would be from people 
currently using VisualD.

>> I keep reading online that Go has great tooling, but having 
>> used it I don't know what people mean when they say that. 
>> Likewise, I read that people want D to have great tooling but 
>> I also don't know what they mean then either.
>
> There is one and only one acceptable formatting of all Go code. 
> The formatters enforce this. Fortunately I quite like the Go 
> code style, unlike the Phobos D style which I find hideous – 
> hence me contributing nothing.

Is that it, though? go fmt? *That's* the "tooling"?

> GoLand is very good.

And yet, as far as I can remember or am aware of, Go managed to 
get very popular despite not having an officially blessed IDE 
from the get-go. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I remember 
it is the users came first, then IDE solutions showed up to cater 
to the new clientele.

> Tooling is all about the UI people use to develop code (obvious 
> but it seems to need saying). Emacs and Vi are all very well 
> but they are very 1980s whatever people might do with them in 
> 2010s.

I disagree. Emacs in 2019 is vastly different from what it was in 
the 90s, never mind the 80s. I don't think I miss anything from 
an IDE while using Emacs to write D except for refactoring 
support. Anything I'd personally care about, anyway.

> The 2000s brought us IDEs

We had IDEs before that. I learned C by typing it into Borland's 
IDE and only transitioned to gcc via DJGPP, which emulated 
Borland's TUI.

> The 2000s brought us IDEs, originally not very good but now the 
> obvious choice for all software development.

Obvious for some. Eclipse infuriated me so much I went back to 
Emacs and I haven't looked back since.

People's preferences differ, however, and I'm trying to 
understand what it is that doesn't work for them with the options 
they have right now.

> Sadly the D plugin to CLion is really not good enough for 
> production use, not from lack of volunteers trying to do stuff, 
> but because volunteers can only start stuff like this. After a 
> while it needs a full-time team. The Rust plugin got taken on 
> by JetBrains. I really cannot see JetBrains taking on the D 
> plugin, so that is not a route to resourcing a quality UI for 
> development.

I assume JetBrains took over the Rust plugin because it'd make 
them money. I'm not sure we could say the same thing.

>> AFAIK nearly everybody uses dub. What else would you like to 
>> see in this area?
>
> Something much less like Dub and a lot more like Cargo.

This is another thing I read a lot that I'm not sure what it 
means. I'm aware of dub's faults, but if we eliminated them, what 
would make cargo better? I've used cargo and still don't know. 
Could you please elaborate on what you like about cargo that 
you'd like to see in dub?