My first experience as a D Newbie

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 13:14:39 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 10/13/17 2:58 AM, Peter R wrote:
>> Replying to a couple of the comments here
>> 
>> "I don't know if it's a different expectation or a different 
>> mindset or something else."
>> I'd like to think I'm fairly knowledgeable, but Yes, I expect 
>> installing/configuring to be easy and quick, so I can get to 
>> the actual programming. I expect solid debugging capabilities, 
>> full IDE support, autocomplete, and 64-bit windows libraries. 
>> It is just some of the things that I am used to with Visual 
>> C++. "Better than C++" is my motivation to evaluate D, and to 
>> me that goes beyond just the language and standard library.
>> If I, as a new user, don't have a solid first impression, I'd 
>> have no expectation that the rest of the D ecosystem is 
>> polished, and I would return to C++
>
> Thanks for replying. I did not mean my post as a slight against 
> your knowledge, but really about my ignorance -- I don't know 
> what the expectations of a Windows user are. I think the 
> Windows users we do have on the core team (Walter being the 
> main one) probably aren't typical Windows developers. But my 
> experience seems to be most of the "I've tried to use D for 10 
> days and it sucks!" rants come from the Windows side, and they 
> are mostly about installation and IDE woes. On my mac, I just 
> do "dvm install 2.076.0" and I'm up and running.
>
> I think at some point, an actual company will pick up the 
> maintenance of a good D IDE for windows, and will solve this 
> problem. Unfortunately, we have to rely on volunteers right 
> now, and that company hasn't materialized.
>
> One note about your requirements, auto-completion I think is 
> something that I love about IDEs for other languages (I would 
> be lost in xcode without it) and is something I've never used 
> with D (all my attempts have been disasters). It's definitely 
> something we need to improve the experience on.
>
> -Steve

The Windows experience is less good.  Not just IDEs, but even a 
simple thing like DMD paths.  That's been broken ever since 
longer Windows paths became common (the code dates back to 1987), 
and it interacts badly with dub, which likes to make a relative 
path going back up to the root directory and then back down again.

We have fixed that (Atila did the work) and will submit a pull 
request once we're happy it meets the right level of quality and 
have been using it a bit ourselves.  But it's a nice illustration 
of the situation: on the one hand people are more inclined to 
expect things to just work on Windows (less inclined to get their 
hands dirty fixing them and to share the solution when they do), 
and on the other they are more likely to break and stay broken 
for a long time:
https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/dmd/pulls

(The above path thing is a problem for command line too).

Then on top of that, there's the problem that the situation for 
installing native libraries on Windows has been completely 
insane, although it's starting to improve now.  Most of the time 
on linux it's a single command to install a library.  It's more 
of a blessing on Windows when that's possible, because it often 
isn't.  And if your benchmark is other ecosystems that take care 
of installing the native C library for you, then D looks 
needlessly complicated.  (Even though it's a C on Windows thing, 
not a D problem).