Input from a newbie

[Jonas]

On Saturday, 7 April 2012 at 23:58:20 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Jonas:
>
>> Hello D community! :-)
>
> Welcome here.
>
>
>> I was looking for a sane, object-oriented, 
>> possible-to-go-low-level programming language, so I decided to 
>> give D a try today.
>
> D supports OOP well enough, but template-based programming 
> seems equally fit or even more. Also keep in mind that the D GC 
> is not so efficient, so avoid creating too many small objects, 
> as you do in Java.
>
>
>> 1) First off, I really couldn't figure out were I was supposed 
>> to post this sort of message.
>
> This is the right place.
>
>
>> 2) I couldn't find any good documentation on the build process 
>> and tools I'm supposed to use. Do you guys use standard 
>> Makefiles? Do you have your own build system? Would be really 
>> helpful if that was covered on the website.
>
> One tool fit for not huge programs is rdmd. I use "bud" still, 
> but it's getting obsolete.
>
>
>> 3) While your error messages are a lot better than GCCs (gives 
>> you more context, hints about how the compiler interpreted 
>> your buggy program, etc) it wouldn't hurt if you made them a 
>> bit more graphical using colors and markers and such (LLVM 
>> like).
>
> I don't think Walter will love this idea.

Could you please elaborate on this a bit more? What's the problem 
with helpful compiler messages?

>> What are use cases for explicit pointers when passing objects? 
>> That's not covered in the documentation AFAIT.
>
> It's not documented because you don't use explicit pointers to 
> pass objects around. Pointers are used to pass structs around 
> when you don't want to copy them.

Thanks for the explanation!

> Take a look here for many small examples programs in D to do 
> many different kind of things (not all of them are up to date 
> or fully correct, but most of them are good, and the wrong ones 
> are being fixed one after the other):
> http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:D

That looks great, thanks, although it's a bit cluttered with all 
those languages ;-)