Rebuild - an annoying feature

[Neil Vice]

"Ty Tower" <tytower at hotmail.com.au> wrote:
> Thats a fair question
> I'm not using it . I hav'nt been able to use it as I have not been 
> satisfied with the stability of what I have downloaded.
> I hav'nt used 2.xx yet I'm still on 1.XX
> So I am experimenting with "D" . In fact I am now looking and learning 
> because I have wasted so much time trying to get it to a useable state I 
> will now become an ardent critic of "D" in "C" forums-good critics know 
> thei subject matter

I don't recall you having any gripes with D as a programming language. Your 
issues seem to be with 3rd-party open-source libraries and tools contributed 
by the D community. Allow me to attempt to address them individually.

Firstly, I also dislike DSSS and rebuild. I don't recall particular 
criticisms with them and I certainly feel no ill will towards the developers 
=) However, particularly the fact that rebuild is/was slow to support 
significant front-end changes in D2 I couldn't wait for it to catch up. What 
do you use to build C code? Make? Make will work just fine with D as well... 
my preference happens to be 'cook' but either way - a criticism of rebuild 
is not a criticism of D any more than a criticism of Make is a criticism of 
C.

As for DWT, a quick visit to the DSource DWT site would indicate that the 
project is still under development. Given this, should you not expect some 
issues? Having said that, as an experiment I am very tempted to install 
linux (Debian being my distribution of choice) and attempt to get the DWT 
examples working to see whether your outrage is justified.

> Note that the support for Windows users is probably a lot better as the 
> distributed .exe files have to be right . I suspect the problem is with 
> Linux/Unix where the download must be compiled and there are so few user 
> in this category that no one has looked at this fully yet .

It would greatly surprise me if there were not many linux D users. I would 
have expected linux users to be more willing to "experiment" with a new 
language like D as a rule... In my experience, doing the same thing under 
Windows and linux, where a tool is available under Windows to perform the 
task, usually requires a bit more effort/patience under linux. That's not to 
say that the result isn't worth the wait, but the very fact that compilation 
is often required means that there is more room for error. How long have you 
been a linux user? I'd be surprised if you hadn't experienced similar 
difficulties using applications other than DMD.

> I originally looked at "D" and thought it was worth knowing about . 
> Getting into it I intended to write a program which needed SWT or 
> something like it . If you look there is nothing stable for Unix so I went 
> to dwt which is "alpha".

And what windowing toolkit comes out-of-the-box with C exactly? I'm not 
saying that they don't exist... but were they written in the 70s by Ritchie 
et. al.? These things take time and are not part of the core language by any 
means. Certainly if you require RAD GUI tools D may not be the language for 
you... at least perhaps not yet. Having said that I would also have thought 
that C would have been a poor choice, prefering C# or Java perhaps.

I am personally using D to write a game engine (in theory =P) and short of 
the sort of bugs and const design issues discussed in this NG I have been 
very happy with the language. I am a C++ fan and have been impressed that D 
has provided the power of C++ without the redundancy of syntax (header 
files) and added many useful modern programming tools. I happen to dislike 
both standard libraries and personally think it was a poor choice on the 
part of the Tango developers to break compatibility with Phobos (though this 
may have been resolved recently?) but I'm a reinvent-the-wheel kind of a guy 
anyway and D has allowed me to do so in very elegant ways IMHO.

> Well since then - what a mess. Thats why I am critical and the Tango 
> /Phobos calamity is simply stupid in its present form for Linux
>
> Honestly wherever I go in "D" I find problems . That means it comes from 
> the heads of the organisation. They are not going to be Google type 
> millionaires I can tell you.

Perhaps your Google comment was simply sarcasm and nothing more, however as 
BCS says, profit is not the motivation behind D. The very fact that such an 
excellent tool has been developed non-commercially by what I understand to 
be a rather small group of people is a testament to the Walter's (and 
others') skill and dedication and I am personally very grateful.

Yes there is much room for improvement, but show me another language with 
the first compiler released last year which meets your criterea? You are 
clearly expecting D to be something it's not, however that's not to say that 
the problems you have encountered are insurmountable. Each tool is not 
suited to every task, but that doesn't make them lesser tools.

As far as your comments regarding "good critics" go, I'm not sure that you 
can be in a position to be critical until you have at least got something 
working. When I first used D I was critical of some of the design decisions 
in the language to the point that I would rant at coworkers in frustration 
=) Since then however, I have read excellent explanations behind these 
decisions on this very NG and have learned the error of my ways. The very 
fact that some clearly intelligent, experienced developers frequent this 
forum and have positive things to say about D suggests to me that something 
must be being done right - and I for one am keen to learn more.

I hope you can find D more useful on another project. Having said that, if 
you are still interested in working with DWT under linux, I could be 
convinced to attempt it myself and detail my results.

Neil