Just starting out

[Nick Sabalausky]

"J Arrizza" <cppgent0 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.74.1318463031.24802.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>
> 1) Which to use: Phobos, Tango, or Tangobos? It makes sense for us to use 
> D2
> so this seems to preclude Tango for now. Correct?
>

Yes.

> Are there plans to merge or standardize on one of these?

Phobos *is* the std lib for D2. Period. It is never going away. The main 
reason Tango ever even happened in the first place was years ago back in the 
pre-D2 days, Phobos was still junk, and wasn't very open, so it didn't get 
much attention (so people came along and made Tango). But with D2, that's 
all changed.

> Phobos and Tango
> seem to be incompatible with each other at this point.
>

No. Only for D1. If Tango ever does end up going D2, it'll be usable 
side-by-side with Phobos (and it would *have* to be simply for the sake of 
it's own adoption.)

> My worry here is if we choose the wrong underlying library we end up 
> having
> to re-write a lot of code later on.
>

If you're going with D2, then there *isn't* any "choosing the wrong 
underlying library". It's Phobos. Period. And nobody who truly is 
knowledgeable about D is ever going to tell you otherwise.

The "Phobos vs Tango" matter is long since dead and buried for years, but 
the ghost of it still seems to haunt us.

> 2) Which compiler? DMD, GDC or something else?  We use Ubuntu 10.04, 64 
> bit
> as our development platform. I'm assuming the gc is in all the D 
> compilers.
>

The main choices are DMD, GDC and LDC. They all have their pros and cons.

Most people use DMD, DMD has the most support from D users, and DMD is 
always the most up-to-date (simply by virtue of being the official compiler 
where all the main D development happens). If in doubt, it's probably the 
best place to start.

Although I've never used them myself, I've heard that GDC and LDC are good, 
too, and that they've both gotten to the point where they're never far 
behind DMD.

If you think you might want to support Windows, forget LDC (at least for 
now). If you might want to target some CPU other than x86 and x64, then DMD 
is out. OTOH, If you think you might want to rebuild the compiler itself, it 
takes hours to build GCC (and, I assume, GDC as well), while it only takes 
minutes to build DMD (no idea how long it takes to build LDC).

> 3) DDT (eclipse plugin) seems relatively green. Any other suggestions for 
> an
> IDE. Not a big deal for us, but it's nice to have source formatting. The 
> DDT
> folks indicated that that feature is a long way off for them.
>

Eclipse is an enormous resource hog. Don't mean to be a total ass about it, 
but it's one of the biggest pieces of bloatware I've ever seen (YMMV). It's 
also *very* Java-centric. I know it supports many other languages but 
Eclipse really is still designed around Java, and the other langauges are 
just kind of crammed into that mold. If you do want to use Eclipse, an 
alternate to DDT is Descent. Descent is older and no longer maintained 
(AIUI), but last I heard it was still more advances and more mature than DDT 
(I don't know if thet's still true, though).

Personally, I like to use Programmer's Notepad 2. Lean, speedy, 
configurable, and supports all the basics like syntax highlighting, code 
folding, etc... Main downsides IMO are that it's Windows-only (That's going 
to be a real pain when I switch to Linux) and that, being based on 
Scintilla, there's no Elastic Tab(stop)s support.

Some people like Code::Blocks, too, and I used to use it a lot myself, but 
as of the last time I used it (~2-3 years ago) it wasn't quite as lean, 
clean or robust as PN2 (still worlds better than Eclipse, though).