VisualD regressions are severe; what do we do about critical infrastructure?

[RazvanN]

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:07:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
> So, since I've been off the wagon for a couple of years; 
> VisualD, which
> used to be ROCK SOLID seems to have suffered major regressions 
> in almost
> every aspect of its functionality.
> I think it's largely related to dmd-as-a-lib now being the 
> foundation for a
> lot of tooling, and it's just criminally unstable...
>
> Rainer used to maintain his own semantic analyser used for 
> formatting,
> auto-complete and suggestions, code navigation, and debugging; 
> it worked
> beautifully! But a couple years back, VisualD was switched to 
> use DMD
> frontend for those duties, and it barely works anymore.
> The old bespoke code is still available, but it's so out of 
> date with the
> modern language that it's not usable anymore.
>
> ...to make this worse; Rainer has effectively checked-out too. 
> We've lost another one of our finest.
>
> This is a general category of problem that's been an issue for 
> a long time; having unfunded one-man efforts maintain essential 
> infrastructure. I wonder if there are any opportunities 
> available to do a lot better here. Does the dlang foundation 
> have any budget for critical infrastructure? And/or anyone that 
> would even consider working on the boring but essential stuff?
>
> Is there actually anyone here who develops on Windows? I don't 
> understand how it could have regressed so far, unless it's just 
> that nobody is using it.
>
> I now recognise a really major conundrum; I've recently 
> returned to D to
> start a company with a greenfields project. VisualD failing is 
> essentially
> terminal. I'm not sure what to do.
> I don't have time available to try and pick up the project and 
> work it
> myself, but the current state is really pushing at the border 
> of forcing me
> to completely rewrite all my code in C++ on account of ecosystem
> reliability.
>
> Ideally, we really need to be properly funding development for 
> critical infrastructure... but I'm not sure we've ever had a 
> sufficient budget to maintain that sort of commitment.

I don't think it's quite fair to say that the problem here was 
the switch
to dmdlib. The problem seems to be the fact that the project is 
not being
actively maintained. The same issues would have appeared even if 
the switch
wouldn't have been done due to the evolution of the language and 
the lack
of time to update visualD to the new dmd behaviors.

However, the broader problem that you are pinpointing: not having 
critical
infrastructure that is being managed by the foundation is indeed 
a problem.
But the reason for this is the lack of resources that can be 
directed to
what we consider to be important. I'd wish we could fix all of 
these, but
unfortunately, we just don't have the manpower.

I am trying to advance the state of dmdlib, butI don't think that 
there's anyone
else working on this.

RazvanN