Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Iain Buclaw]

On 1 September 2013 03:05, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have to get the user experience and first impressions under control...
>
> I'd really love to to see a general roadmap and list of priorities. Even if
> goals are high-level, they might help direct focus?
>

First impressions are important.  And I've found that whenever I talk
about D, people are generally wow'd at some of the design choices of
the language vs Java, C++.  But I do stress that focus is really the
only area that we are lacking in to get us across the chasm in terms
of adoption.


>
> Configuring compilers:
>
> Naturally, this is primarily a problem with the windows experience, but it's
> so frustrating that it is STILL a problem... how many years later?
> People don't want to 'do work' to install a piece of software. Rather, they
> expect it to 'just work'. We lost about 6 hours trying to get everyone's
> machines working properly.
> In the context of a 48 hour game jam, that's a terrible sign! I just kept
> promising people that it would save time overall... which I wish were true.
>
> The only compiler you can realistically use productively in windows is
> DMD-Win64, and that doesn't work out of the box.
> We needed to mess with sc.ini for quite some time to get the stars aligned
> such that it would actually compile and find the linker+libs.
>

Trying upgrading Windows.  https://www.fsf.org/windows8


>
> Getting a workable environment:
>
> Unsurprisingly, the Linux user was the only person happy work with a
> makefile. Everybody else wanted a comfortable IDE solution (and the linux
> user would prefer it too).
>
> !!!!!!!!!
> This has to be given first-class attention!
> I am completely and utterly sick of this problem. Don made a massive point
> of it in his DConf talk, and I want to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-stress how
> absolutely important this is.
> !!!!!!!!!
>
> I have come to the conclusion that treating IDE integration as ancillary
> projects maintained by usually just one single member of the community has
> absolutely failed.
> I suggest:
>  * These should be made central D community projects.
>  * I think they should be hosted in the same github organisation as DMD.
>  *** As many contributors as possible should be encouraged to work with them
> every day.
>    - Deprecate DMD makefiles. Seriously! Insist that contributors use the
> IDE bindings to work on DMD.
>    - The fact that you all laughed at the prior point suggests clearly why
> it needs to be done. It will cease to be a problem when all the
> druntime/phobos contributors are suffering the end-user experience.
>  * They should receive bugs in the main github bug-tracker, so EVERY D
> contributor can see them, and how many there are.
>

Central to the community projects?
Absolutely yes.

Hosted in same location as DMD?
That's their choice if they want to do that.

Deprecate DMD Makefile?
I'd rather give both options, rather than force someone to go one way
or the other.

Force everyone to use IDE's?
VIM is an IDE. :o)


> IDE integration absolutely needs to be considered a first class feature of
> D.

An IDE is not a feature of a language.  Unless you are a RAD language
that removes the ability of developers to write a single line of code
(and do it awfully).


> I also suggest that the IDE integration downloads should be hosted on the
> dlang download page so they are obvious and available to everyone without
> having to go looking, and also as a statement that they are actually
> endorsed by the dlanguage authorities. As an end-user, you're not left
> guessing which ones are good/bad/out of date/actually work/etc.
>

That is their choice to make.

> Obviously, we settled on Visual-D (Windows) and Mono-D (OSX/Linux); the only
> realistic choices available. The OSX user would have preferred an XCode
> integration.
>

Why not VIM?

> Overwhelmingly, the biggest complaint was a lack of symbolic information to
> assist with auto-completion. Visual-D tries valiantly, but it falls quite
> short of the mark.
> This goes back to the threads where the IDE guys are writing their own
> parsers, when really, DMD should be able to be built as a lib, with an API
> designed for using DMD as a lib/plugin.

If you are referring to DMD as the whole application, that's their
choice, but a library/plugin is not very useful for invoking directly.
;-)

If you are referring to the D Front-End implementation, I will request
for you to stop calling it DMD, and will also suggest a different
approach.
The components of the D Front-End are intended to be shared at the
source level, rather than being a library that gets built, installed,
and linked against. Thus, there is no distribution tarball; the idea
is to copy files from D Front-End into your own source tree.

This is something that I am working towards alongside DMD and LDC
devs. So that we end up with a shared front-end between our compiler
backends.  For IDE integration, they could in theory do the exact
same.  Take the D Front-End and implement their backend against an
IDE.


> I think continuous code compilation for auto-completion and syntax
> highlighting purposes should be a service offered and maintained by DMD.
> That way it will evolve with the language, and anyone can use it without
> reinventing the wheel.
>

WAT.


>
> Debugging:
>
> Poor debugging experience wastes your time every 5 minutes.
> I can only speak for the Windows experience (since we failed to get OSX
> working); there are lots of problems with the debugging experience under
> visual studio...
> I haven't logged bugs yet, but I intend to.
> There were many instances of people wasting their time chasing bugs in
> random places when it was simply a case of the debugger lying about the
> value of variables to them, and many more cases where the debugger simply
> refused to produce values for some variables at all.
> This is an unacceptable waste of programmers time, and again, really burned
> us in a 48hour context.
>
>

This is why GDC rox.


> Documentation:
>
> Okay for the most part, but some windows dev's want a CHM that looks like
> the typical Microsoft doc's people are used to. Those that aren't familiar
> with the CHM viewer; it's just HTML but with a nice index + layout tree.
>
>

Use the web?


> Bugs:
> Yes, we hit DMD bugs, like the one with opaque structs which required
> extensive work-arounds.
>   struct MyStruct;
>   MyStruct*[] = new MyStruct*[n];
>

I'm not sure if that should work / don't see the advantage over just
using a void*.


> We also ran into some completely nonsense error messages, but I forgot to
> log them, since we were working against the clock.
>
>

Shame on you.


> One more thing:
> I'll just pick one language complaint from the weekend.
> It is how quickly classes became disorganised and difficult to navigate
> (like Java and C#).
> We all wanted to ability to define class member functions outside the class
> definition:
>   class MyClass
>   {
>     void method();
>   }
>
>   void MyClass.method()
>   {
>     //...
>   }
>
> It definitely cost us time simply trying to understand the class layout
> visually (ie, when IDE support is barely available).
> You don't need to see the function bodies in the class definition, you want
> to quickly see what a class has and does.
>
>

That does seem more of the point of D interface files (.di).


> </endrant>

Twisted firestarter. :o)


Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

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