Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:27:50 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/93jh5/
> ask_proggit_the_d_programming_language_looks/
>> I noticed some people complain about installation difficulties, is there
>> progress on the community project for writing installer for the three
>> major OSs?
>>
>> Andrei
> 
> I'm intending a rework of:
> 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/InstallingDCompiler
> 
> but haven't got around to it and can only cover Linux and Windows.
> 
> The end result will be at:
> 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/StartingWithD/Compiler/
> DMD

Thanks, we need more of that stuff. I think this is a common experience 
(pasted from the reddit discussion):

==========
i couldn't manage to get the command line toolchain up and running in 
linux either. yes, part of it was me being lazy, but there really is no 
good documentation saying "this is where your D installation needs to 
go, these are the environment variables you need, this is how to write a 
makefile or equivalent, this is the filesystem layout the build tool 
expects, this is how to use a c library, etc".
==========

A while ago Walter put a good amount of work into accelerating code 
generation by avoiding writing object files to disk. He mentioned that 
that's a nice feature that old and new users will notice. I agree with 
that, but I also think installation has a huge importance. Having 
streamlined code generation but a crappy installer is like showing up at 
a first date pocketing a condom, but wearing an MSDN conference T-shirt.


Andrei