Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Joakim]

While there has been a lot of back and forth with Manu in this 
thread, I think it's best to look at his game jam experience as a 
kind of stress test for D installation and usage, ie informative 
but extreme.  Game development, especially in a rush and with 
everything being installed automatically for the user, is not a 
use case that is well-plumbed in D right now.  It would be nice 
if debugging properly worked, but given the complexity involved 
that Walter mentioned, it's understandable that it doesn't.

Speaking of debuggers, there was a BSD-licensed debugger written 
in D around 2009, likely D1.  It was abandoned by the author, who 
told me he got busy with work, but Martin Nowak resurrected it 
for some time a couple years back:

https://github.com/dawgfoto/ngdb

Perhaps it can be resurrected as a debugger for D, since it is 
written in D.

On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 07:42:52 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-09-01 21:44, Brian Schott wrote:
>
>> It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. I'd like to do this, 
>> but there
>> would have to be several companies already using D 
>> professionally for it
>> to be a viable business model. And for a company to invest in 
>> D, they'd
>> probably want the tooling to already exist.
>
> I would like that as well. But I feel the same things. Are 
> there any customers?
It strikes me that commercial support is the correct way to fix a 
lot of these problems, which are about fit and finish, that many 
others have noted open source projects are notoriously bad at.  I 
suggested a licensing model for how D could provide commercial 
support in a different thread:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/kq9r7t$nu$1@digitalmars.com#post-sglcqsiphpntcdlhvwvn:40forum.dlang.org

The usual open source zealots argued with me, suggesting that any 
closed source reference implementation would be unwelcome, even 
if always accompanied by an open source implementation that's 
available for free.  I won't get into the even sillier arguments 
used, ;) perhaps such people wouldn't mind as long it wasn't 
Walter and dmd, ie the reference implementation, that went 
closed/paid, ie if Brian or someone else did it.

As for needing "several companies already using D professionally 
for it to be a viable business model," most companies don't start 
that way.  You find a few users willing to pay for fit and finish 
or optimizations and you grow it from part-time work to as far as 
the business will go.  I certainly hope someone is willing to do 
that.