D needs to get its shit together!

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> Just try getting D installed on all 3 major systems for DMD, 
> LDC, GDC, with an IDE, some utilities, possibly arm 
> support(even though it's new and expected to have some issues), 
> etc. The issues really start popping up when you are trying to 
> use x86 + x64. Library issues that result in strange error 
> messages instead of "This compiler is not compatible with the 
> phobos v2.4324".

Might be worth considering something like the Android SDK 
installer. It looked like this:

http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/4515__android_sdk_1_8_5_15.png

Essentially it was a cross-platform package manager GUI, which 
allowed installing platform support for various platform versions 
side-by-side, as well as additional utilities and dependencies. 
It also exposed its functionality via command-line tools and IDE 
integrations. This translates fairly well to the D ecosystem, and 
could serve as a decent work-around for Windows' lack of native 
package management.

We have some of the pieces as separate tools (Digger, DVM, the 
dlang.org/install.sh script, the Windows' installer's Visual 
Studio detection/integration), could be nice tying them together 
into a palatable GUI. Digger has a rudimentary one, which 
probably could be wrapped into a native-like app using Electron, 
but still lacking features such as managing GDC/LDC.