Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Chris]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 14:53:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> 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 forgot to mention yesterday, it need not be CLion, in fact I'd 
strongly advise against an IDE you have to pay for. No beginner / 
person interested in D will pay for an IDE just to test D - and 
without an IDE, people will be less willing to test it not to 
mention adopt it.

I'd say IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition would be a good starting 
point or Netbeans. I personally like Netbeans, but strategically 
IntelliJ would be the better choice, because a lot of devs are 
already familiar with it and use it for JVM and Android 
development (Android Studio is basically IntelliJ), which is a 
huge sector. Once you get a proper IntelliJ plugin for D that 
takes advantage of the IDE's superb features that make you more 
productive, it will augment D's prestige, and who knows, maybe 
JetBrains will take over the plugin (but I wouldn't bet on it).

Long story short: IDE integration and a solid package manager are 
the minimum requirements for wider adoption today. Else you will 
forever remain in the "garage" where nerds solder things together.