One more question - an untapped audience.

[Adam Wilson]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:03:28 -0800, Mike Parker <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 04:29:22 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>
>> I don't know if I can express how strongly I disagree with that  
>> sentiment. I don't use dub, I don't really want to use dub, and I am  
>> virtually certain that the whole concept of using dub is a going to  
>> make newbie acceptance much more difficult. D is supposed to make life  
>> easier, not harder.
>>
>> DUB is great if you're an experienced linux dev. But for somebody just  
>> getting started, especially those coming from other languages with  
>> standard libraries (aka, all of them) the idea of having to use a  
>> package manager to do anything is completely backwards. We need to be  
>> reducing our project setup times, not increasing them by making people  
>> download the same 10 packages for every project they start. People want  
>> to download a language and start writing code. Not faff about with  
>> getting the right package configuration just to write some output to  
>> the console.
>>
>
> You're greatly underestimating just how easy dub makes developing with  
> D. I'm by no means a Linux dev. My life has been lived on Windows. But I  
> use dub exclusively now and would love to see it packaged with DMD and  
> become the de facto way to get D libraries. If Phobos were to be broken  
> into a set of dub packages, even better.
>
> Setting up a package.json for a new project is extremely easy. Once it's  
> done you can copy it around for future projects with minor changes.  
> Compilation, in its simplest form, then becomes:
>
> dub build
>
> And all the libraries you need are automatically pulled down. Then they  
> are available for any other projects that need them. It doesn't get any  
> easier than that.
>
> Plus, once all of the D IDEs get support for it worked out, you then  
> have one universal project configuration tool. No more need to provide  
> build scripts, make files, Visual Studio solutions, MonoD projects, or  
> whatever else. No matter your choice of text editor/IDE, one  
> configuration file rules them all.
>
> Ultimately, this would make it much, much easier to get started with D.  
> So far, my experience in using dub with Derelict has suggested this to  
> be true. I still get people asking for help with using Derelict 3  
> without dub, often because they don't know how to configure the import  
> path or the linker in their IDE, or don't understand what it even means  
> (and, apparently, have failed to read any documentation on the subject).  
> I've gotten *zero* compile/link issues about building with dub. Maybe  
> that just means the newbies aren't using dub, or that they aren't  
> reporting their problems to me, but I suspect it's because dub is easy.

Well, I can be wrong. I fully admit to not having any experience with it.  
But that doesn't answer my other problem. :-)

-- 
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator