DConf 2013 keynote

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 12 May 2013 18:35:25 +0200
"Juan Manuel Cabo" <juanmanuel.cabo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, 12 May 2013 at 03:58:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > The nicest thing of all, IMO, about not strictly needing all 
> > that
> > support software is that basic things like
> > editing/navigating/opening/closing code is always and forever 
> > 100%
> > unobstructed by things like startup delays and keyboard input 
> > lag which
> > have no business existing on the rocket-engined supercomputers 
> > we now
> > call "a PC".
> 
> I'm using a little known IDE for D known as Poseidon:
>      http://www.dsource.org/projects/poseidon/wiki/Screenshots
> it is very fast, loads very quickly, and the editor is very 
> responsive. The keyword autocompletion is mostly broken in D2 but 
> I can live without it. It is a bit sad that it has gone 
> unmantained for more than a year.
> 

Looks interesting. Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall hearing
about it back then. Personally, I've been a huge fan of Programmer's
Notepad 2 <http://www.pnotepad.org/>. My #1 complaint about it though
is that it's Windows-only. I want to switch to Linux for my primary
system, but the lack of PN2 is one of the roadblocks (there are other
roadblocks, though).

> These are the things that I cannot live without for my big D2 
> project:
>      - Syntax highlighting.
>      - Search in multiple files.
>      - Can go to file/line when double-clicking on compiler error.
>      - Compile/run/debug just by hitting SHIFT-F5, and other keys.

Yea, PN2 has all of that. Essential stuff IMO too.

>      - Tree like structure for navigating all the many source 
> files of my project.

PN2 has that for files, although it looks like Poseidon goes another
step further and puts funcs/classes/etc into the tree, too. I heavily
use PN2's FF-like QuickFind for that sort of thing. Obviously not as
good, but it gets me where I'm going ;)

>      - Debugging (breakpoints, step by step, go to line that 
> crashed). It suprisingly still works in Poseidon.

Yea, that's something PN2 doesn't have. (Un)Luckily for me, I've spent
a lot of time in the past on things where I didn't have a debugger
available (one time my only debugging aid was a single LED! Royal
PITA!), so I've gotten so accustomed to printf debugging that I find I
usually prefer it.

Debuggers are great, I'd never deny that, but one thing I love about
printf-style is you can trivially go back-and-forth in time just by
scrolling. Debuggers only give you one time-slice at a time, and can
usually only progress forwards.

Of course, printf-style debugging really needs a language that compiles
fast. Fine for D, but it's no so fun with C/C++.

>      - No need for a makefile. It feeds all source files 
> (hundreds) and libraries to dmd.
> 

I used to swear by Visual Studio (until it got bloated, somewhere
around one of the earlier .NET versions) and I loved the whole
approach of "no makefiles, just feed all the project files to the
compiler".

But these days I prefer RDMD-style approaches ("pass the one main
source file to a cmdline tool and it figures out the rest") because
they're trivially scriptable and don't cause a specific editor (or any
editor at all) to become a build requirement. I find that especially
important for OSS and cross-platform projects.

Ever dealt with automated building of a multi-part project that
included building a Visual Studio project or (worse) a Flash project as
just one part of the overall process? Blech. It's awful.


> For smaller D projects I use Vim/makefiles though.
> 
> Again, I'm a bit sad that it has gone unmantained for so long, 
> but it's totally usable still. This is the faster IDE that I've 
> found.
> 
> --jm
>