Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2019-10-17 at 08:38 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> 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.

CLion can be obtained on a free licence for people working on FOSS projects.

I agree though that whilst someone might run up the community editions of
IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm to try them out, that there is no community edition
of CLion and GoLand is a massive barrier to trying them out.

> 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).

Like the Rust plugin, the D plugin works with IntelliJ IDEA. However there is
no debugging capability for native code languages in IntelliJ IDEA, you have
to use CLion to get that.

So pushing a D plugin in the community edition of IntelliJ IDEA is a way
forward for trying to capture JetBrains IDE addicts to D. However the D plugin
needs more work to do this.

> 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.

Agreed.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

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