Documentation suggestion
Don Allen
donaldcallen at gmail.com
Sun Feb 25 17:25:43 UTC 2024
Having worked with D for awhile now, after a period of love-hate
with Rust, I'd like to make a documentation suggestion.
One of the things I like about Rust is the ability of the
compiler to provide many helpful suggestions for keeping your
code as uncluttered as possible. I'm talking about unused
variable warnings, unnecessary 'use' statements, variables that
don't need to be mutable, etc.
When first starting to work in D, I missed that. Then somehow
(probably here) I learned about dscanner. Over a little time,
I've found a D methodology that feels much like Rust, without all
the annoyances and frustrations that are part of living with Rust
and its fanboys.
As many of you do, I use DMD when developing, taking advantage of
the compilation speed. But using dscanner has been a big help in
cleaning up my code, ala Rust.
The website has the 'Learn' page, which I believe talks mostly
about language features. I would suggest adding some discussion
of things like the advantage of having the fast compiler while
developing and another a slower compiler for use once development
ends (if it ever does :-) that provides stronger optimization. I
would also suggest discussion of the use of dscanner and dfmt
(I'm really looking forward to the new one, because I'm
constantly cleaning up after the old one's mistakes) and the
availability of serve-d. And I would certainly mention ImportC,
which is a significant asset.
These are all excellent aspects of D that are external to the
language itself. I'd like to see a section of 'Learn' that talks
about these things, pulling it all together in one place, to help
people have a really good experience developing in D much earlier
than I did.
I'm crazy-busy in my retirement, but if I can find the time, I
will try to write something that I've described above. But if I
don't get to this, someone should. Without this, D's virtues are
being undersold.
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list