Visual D issues

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 11/10/2018 06:34, James Japherson wrote:
> I've been having a lot of issues with visual D. I'm not sure if it's
> just dysfunctional, has a few bugs, new bugs were introduced, or what
> has happened. Some things have always been like then. I have a potential
> solution though.
> 
> I will invest quite a bit of time documenting the issues I have using
> video, pictures and text, explaining why these problems are bad and even
> give the source code so you can use it to help fix these problems.
> 
> Most of these problems seem like bugs, some are inadequacies, some are
> probably just incomplete features, some may be expected behavior for
> some peoples workflow but doesn't work in mine.
> 
> If I do this will you be willing to take a serious look in to these
> problems and try to resolve them if we can come to an agreement that
> they are problems? (and that might simply be that it is an issue on my
> side if everything works as they are suppose to on yours)
> 
> Why I'm asking is that I am extremely unproductive in D because of it's
> arcane debugging problems that I seem to run in to quite often. I'm sure
> if these problems could be fixed(or the major ones), I'd be far more
> productive and enjoy the experience more too.
> 
> But there is no point in me doing this if you won't or can't invest the
> time(it's not a demand or insult, I just don't want to waste my time).
> 
> I've already brought up many of these problems so you basically know
> about them more or less. I realize it's hard to really know what's going
> on much less fix them without really seeing the problem and knowing why
> it is a problem(most of these problems have solutions but the
> solutions/work-arounds are extremely time consuming compared to what the
> debugger/ide can do). This is why I would invest the time to really show
> these problems in detail and explain why the alternative is better(and
> these things are not arcane issues I have, at least most of them).
> 
> I realize some of these problems are not solvable in any satisfiable
> sense but some are definitely needed for efficiency. Some of the harder
> ones could be long term goals to work on a little at a time so they
> eventually get fixed.
> 
> Since I'm not proficient and already have too much on my plate, I can't
> learn the inner workings of Visual D and try to fix these things myself,
> hence why you'll have to do it if you choose to.

Pedantically, Visual D has only very little influence on the debug
experience, it is a combination of the compiler-generated debug
information, the VS debugger and the mago debugger-plugin or mago
debug-engine depending on what engine you select.

> 
> Of course, you have none to lose to pretend that you'll invest your
> time... but I hope you wouldn't do that to me. No big deal if you really
> don't want to or can't. Life is more important, but if these fixes can
> persist(not regress) then they should make programming in Visual D much
> more friendly for most people that use it in the future.

I'm interested in making the debug experience better, but I can't
promise I can solve all issues. Visual D and mago are still more-or-less
one-man-projects I do in my spare time.

Videos are good if the issue is hard to demonstrate or not easily
reproducible. Small reproducible test cases are often a lot easier to
get started, though.

Please post issues to https://issues.dlang.org, so they don't get lost
in forum discussions.