Is the D community lacking development tools?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-05-22 13:21, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 May 2012 at 10:59:04 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 2012-05-22 12:03, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
>>> http://d-coding.com/2012/05/22/is-the-d-community-lacking-development-tools.html
>>>
>>
>> I agree with basically everything in that article.
>
> I would also appreciate any specific feedback

* do you think such project is worth the effort?

Yes

* do you feel that D ecosystem lacks tool support?

Yes

* Does this prevent many from using D?

Probably, not me though

* which tools are needed most? Which may be needed, but are not a high 
priority for you?

This is quite hard, that is, how to prioritize. This is my list, in no 
particular order:

* IDE
* Compiler (usable as a library)
* Build tool
* Testing framework
* GUI library
* Tool for automatically create bindings for C/C++/Objective-C
* ABI compatible with Objective-C, i.e. extern(Objective-C)
* Package manager
* Support for iOS

The hard thing is to prioritize. I'm thinking like this:

You need a compiler and an IDE/editor to write any tools. I would like 
and IDE that is just as good as Eclipse JDT. For that to happen we need 
a compiler usable as a library. I'm assuming we want to write as much as 
possible in D so a compiler written in D is necessary. A GUI library 
would be needed as well.

You would also need a build tool and testing framework to write new 
tools. Since we want to have everything as modularized and reusable as 
possible a package manager is also really needed.

If you also want to slap on a GUI on the tools you need a GUI library. 
For Mac OS X it would be a lot easier to be ABI compatible with 
Objective-C to create a GUI library.

For most of these tools, in particular: the build tool, testing 
framework and package manager it would be nice to have the compiler 
usable as a library. This would allow to have build scripts and other 
scripts written in D.

So to summarize:

A lot of the tools needed to be built depends on each other but I think 
most of the tools depend on a compiler, written in D, usable as a library.

* was this post useful? What could I change to make future posts in the 
series better?

Not really for me, nothing I didn't already know.

* should I add commenting on my blog, or dlang forum is better for that?

I prefer commenting here.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg