Continuation of `Having "blessed" 3rd party libraries may make D more popular` DIP thread

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Thursday, 10 July 2025 at 14:06:06 UTC, jmh530 wrote:

> I tried getting ChatGPT to write D last year and it was a 
> frustrating experience. I subscribe to the plus version now*, 
> but haven't tried it with D code. Given some other frustrating 
> experiences with it, I don't have high hopes unless there is 
> some kind of new breakthrough in the technology**.

I've had good luck with Github Copilot Pro, which I can use for 
free as an academic. LLMs have become a lot more useful in the 
last year.

I've had great luck with Copilot on my D code. That's not because 
I can give it a prompt and then compile and use the 3000 lines of 
code it spits out. I can't even do that with Javascript. It has 
detailed knowledge of the compiler internals, the standard 
library, the spec, and third-party libraries on Github. I use it 
to write documentation, to write small helper functions, to write 
templates, do reviews of my code, and that sort of thing. I find 
the code reviews very helpful.

Until recently, I never understood how to write my own ranges 
that could be used like this: `foreach(index, value; myrange)`. 
It is a great example of using LLMs the right way. It wrote a 
short block of code. I then had no choice but to fully understand 
everything in the block so I could fix the bug. Another thing is 
interacting with DLLs on Windows.