End user experience with D

[Peter Williams]

On 02/09/13 09:36, Ramon wrote:
> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 23:22:30 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 22:21:10 UTC, Ramon wrote:
>>> Finally and possibly most importantly, basically not having fully
>>> working  debugger support is a very serious lack.
>>
>> Maybe it is because I write 100% bug free code the first time every
>> time ( :-) ) but I've found the gdb support, at least on Linux, to be
>> really pretty good.
>>
>> I compile with -gc -debug - the "pretend to be C" option is something
>> I started doing years ago and might not be necessary anymore, but I've
>> found it to be plenty good enough anyway.
>>
>>> D's bias toward Windows doesn't help either.
>>
>> If anything, I don't think D goes far enough in its Windows support.
>> It works well there, sure, even the optlink things others complain
>> about don't bother me, but there's a lot of stuff it could easily do
>> and doesn't, at least not without grabbing additional downloads.
>>
>> On Linux, dmd works quite excellently, as do gdc and ldc.
>
> -gc? Hmmm ... I'll try that. Thanks for the tip ;)
>
> For the rest: Frankly, I'm not even sure, I should follow that kind of
> discussion (like in Manu's thread) anymore. I don't mean to offend
> someone but it strikes me as ... uhm ... brains not used at their full
> power ... when "there is no really properly and fully working IDE"
> (which is pretty close to a killer for many) gt thrown in - and
> seriously - discussed with stuff like "nenene, in Windows Visual Blah
> 2010 it worked and now Intellisense works only with handish settings,
> nenene".
> Even worse, while I'm still hoping for a promising statement by a
> heavy-weight like e.g. W. Bright along the line "Yep, we really,
> seriously need some working cross platform IDE, preferably an easy to
> install one" ... one seems quite happy to seriously adress nitty-bitties
> for Windows Whatever 2012 (c) (tm) $$$.
>
> Maybe perfection must be three, the catholic way, a triplet. Maybe we
> need another incarnation of Andrei A. (who brought great stuff to D) but
> this third guy bringing good useabilty to D.

IMHO, the IDE should only be a wrapper around the core functionality and 
never be so closely integrated that the core is unusable without the 
IDE.  Personally, I just like using a configurable editor (e.g.  Geany, 
emacs and so on) which knows (or can be taught) how to do various useful 
things that an IDE might offer.

If you want an IDE then create one but make it an "add on" and don't 
expect everyone to use it.

Cheers
Peter
PS I especially hate IDEs that try to force me to create "projects".
PPS I especially like IDEs that have built in terminal editors so that 
you can do command line stuff without the need for a separate window.