D tooling is disappointing

[tastyminerals]

On Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 18:07:25 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 10:45:16 UTC, tastyminerals 
> wrote:
>> _This is a longer than average post where I mostly express 
>> personal concerns about things that you probably heard 100 of 
>> times..._
>
> One problem is that this type of post is too vague. Saying the 
> tooling is "disappointing" is the equivalent of saying you 
> think the compiler should be improved. What you say might well 
> be true, but it's hard to know exactly what you are saying.
>
> The first step to improvement is being clear about what the 
> tooling should do. Then, importantly, reference tooling that 
> works for other languages and provide explicit information 
> about how to do that for D. Really, it doesn't help to talk 
> about "tooling". To push for change, you should pick the small 
> part of the tooling that is causing you the biggest headaches 
> and provide clear steps for improving that.

Correct. As it usually happens, the matter got lost in emotional 
waves.

What I am missing as a casual D user is a working autocompletion 
with doc hints akin to what one can see in bloated IntelliJ IDEs. 
IntelliJ Scala plugin is a great example of how a proper language 
support can be done. It is so good that IntelliJ is exclusively 
advised and used for Scala development these days. It saves time, 
it helps you to navigate in a huge project and what's most 
important learn the language.
For D the best thing we have is the code-d plugin for VSCode. For 
Vim we have personal hacks. The code-d plugin is good, and of 
course it could be better.