Which tools do you miss in D?

[Brian Schott]

On Tuesday, 28 January 2014 at 03:43:11 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> On Monday, 27 January 2014 at 13:12:56 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> D doesn't have a preprocessor or a horrible network of text 
>> include, it
>> should easily be able to match the C# experiences in general.
>
> No, it's much, much harder because of templates and string 
> mixins.

Agreed. D is a language that almost seems like it was designed to 
maximize the difficulty of creating a complete autocomplete 
engine. As soon as you hit a line that looks like

mixin (someRandomTemplate!(a, b, c)(d, e, f));

you need a full compiler front-end to provide complete 
autocomplete.

> The only way to get a solid auto-complete experience for D is 
> to use a compiler-as-library, which is why I think the approach 
> that VisualD and Mono-D (and DScanner to some extent, IIRC) 
> takes is a colossal waste of time, as "good enough" will in 
> fact never be good enough.

If they were a waste of time nobody would use them.