Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2019-10-16 at 11:14 +0000, Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> What tooling what you like to see developed that doesn't exist 
> now?

A D plugin to CLion as good as the Rust plugin.

There are some people working on this but it needs more resource: a collection
of volunteers are not going to be able to achieve what three or four fulltime
people could.

> I keep reading online that Go has great tooling, but having used 
> it I don't know what people mean when they say that. Likewise, I 
> read that people want D to have great tooling but I also don't 
> know what they mean then either.

There is one and only one acceptable formatting of all Go code. The formatters
enforce this. Fortunately I quite like the Go code style, unlike the Phobos D
style which I find hideous – hence me contributing nothing.

GoLand is very good.

Tooling is all about the UI people use to develop code (obvious but it seems
to need saying). Emacs and Vi are all very well but they are very 1980s
whatever people might do with them in 2010s. The 2000s brought us IDEs,
originally not very good but now the obvious choice for all software
development. Go has Goland; Rust, C, and C++ have CLion; Java, Kotlin, Groovy,
Clojure, etc. have IntelliJIDEA; and Python has PyCharm – and yes I am as I
appear to be, a fan of JetBrain IDEs.

Sadly the D plugin to CLion is really not good enough for production use, not
from lack of volunteers trying to do stuff, but because volunteers can only
start stuff like this. After a while it needs a full-time team. The Rust
plugin got taken on by JetBrains. I really cannot see JetBrains taking on the
D plugin, so that is not a route to resourcing a quality UI for development.

> AFAIK nearly everybody uses dub. What else would you like to see 
> in this area?

Something much less like Dub and a lot more like Cargo.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

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