Questions about D for a real project

[BCS]

I have been asked by my boss to put together a overview of the state of D 
with regards to using it in a medium sized commercial app. It will be a development 
tool that we expect to be, complexity wise, somewhat akin to AWK, the C preprocessor 
or pearl. Several of the questions I have been asked to address were easy 
for me to answer but a few are outside my experience. So I’m looking for 
answers to some of these questions.


I’ll post their questions (with a few edits) and, where appropriate, the 
specific points I’m looking for input on.

1. “ddbg works great with dmd 2.012.  However, when used with dmd 1.x, the 
local values do not print well. Please find out if there are plans to support 
dmd 1.x in ddbg.”


2. “Please determine how Code::Blocks works as a debugger when combined with 
ddbg for dmd 1.x.”
-a. Is D support under code::blocks under active development?
-b. If we were to use it and then found D specific issues are we likely to 
see the fixed in a reasonably short time frame?


3. “Can Code::Blocks do auto-complete in general and what would it take to 
make it work for D.”
-a. I should really answerer the first bit myself but I don’t have Code::Blocks 
(or C++) set up on my systems.


4. “What is the current stability of dmd 2.0?”
-a. I said alpha. Please correct me if I’m wrong.


5. “What is the estimated “ship date” of dmd 2.0?”


6. “What is the new features list for dmd 2.0? “



I generally develop with a good text editor and a build script so I’m not 
at all up to date on IDE’s and such so I have a few questions of my own:

1. What is the state of the art in IDE’s for D? Code::Blocks? Eclipse+Decent?

2. What stage are these in? Stable, approaching stability, active development, 
in development but not very active? 

3. Same for debuggers. I know ddbg works on windows and for Linux there is 
a GDB patch and ZeroBugs. However I haven’t seen much recent work on any 
of these. 

4. Direct question to Walter (and the developers of the other tools) If we 
were to use D and run into a blocking issue, can we effect your properties 
with regards to resolving it? (This assumes that the issue is not a language 
design issue.)


If I get enough responses that I can put together a report of some kind for 
my boss I’ll post it somewhere (with necessary redactions ;-)