[RFC] IDE starter kit

[Andrzej Kilijański]

On Thursday, 1 February 2018 at 12:21:24 UTC, rjframe wrote:

> Do you have any thoughts, ideas, foresee any problems, have a 
> better way to do this? I especially don't want to do something 
> that is actively harmful - if the self-contained package makes 
> things confusing to someone trying to work with 
> globally-installed tools too, that could potentially be worse 
> than what we have now.
>

I think that many people looking for a new language first check 
the possibilities of creating a GUI. At least it was with me. If 
I did not found DlangUI by accident, I would not be interested in 
D. Maybe on the main page should be a GUI tab with recommended 
packages with screenshots?

Personally, I am surprised by the constant struggle with the 
garbage collector. For most common applications, this is not a 
problem. And the lack of cross-platform GUI creation is a big 
problem. D can win against Rust or Nimlang in this field.

When I was choosing the new language for me, I tested Rust, Nim, 
D and many more. Only D had enough mature GUI to write IDE 
(DlangIDE). And now, after a year, I created my first commercial 
application using DlangUI, and the whole code was written in 
DlangIDE.

When I wrote it 50% of the time it was fixing errors in DlangUI. 
So DlangUI and DlangIDE need more programmers and can easily 
become a big competitor for eg QT. Especially that it is released 
under the Boost license.

For me it does not have to be one package, but the possibility of 
creating applications with GUI should be more exposed on D main 
web page. Although it might be fun to create 
GUIAppDeveloperStarterPack with ready to run examples.

Or maybe we just need a package of examples in download page.