On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 17:54:01 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 17:39:45 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> ...
>
> There is crucial difference between having a company providing commercial services for D users (good) and having anything closed/commercial in reference implementation (bad). Former is simply matching the demand from certain market segment. Latter is screwing the life for everyone else. There is hardly anything common here.

Wait, I do not advocate building a closed source or non free reference implementation of the compiler or of the standard library.
Those need to stay open source of course.

But there are plenty of pro quality tools that are sorely missing right now:
- an IDE that works with any of the 3 existing compilers
- an integrated debugger
- a graphical memory usage viewer/analyzer
- a visual profiler
- an integrated package manager
- maybe a GUI library

Etc. The existence of such tools would be a very big incentive for companies to try D seriously.

I think dicebot has hit a point there. It's true, much if not most of OS software is a (hopefully) somewhat niced up version of what was written to scratch a personal itch.

But I'm quite confident that this is not true for a project like D. I mean, just to come up with a solid and well thought description of the itch (like "C++ is a mess and a PITA") that can serve as guiding line when conceiving a language is a major undertaking. One possibly may come up with some script thingy just to scratch an itch; to conceive, design and implement something like D, however, was and is a very major undertaking, 1000s and 1000s of hours, aso.

Wouldn't one like then that others see, too, what one has understood 10 years ago and tried to make better? Wouldn't one then want to make it really easy to test drive the language, see it's power (on cpus rather than web sites)?

My driver for complaining about D is *that it's so great* - but quite low on the useability side. If D weren't that great I'd simply have turned away.

I get Walter Brights point that he can't (and doesn't want to) be in charge of everything and the kitchen sink. The debugger issue though *does* concern dmd itself and not having a realiably working debugger with full (usual) functionality *is* a major show-stopper.
I mean, come on, how reasonable and consistent is it to leave the C/C++ mess and to then spread debug writelns all over the place?!

For the rest, I agree, it might be hard to see for emacs/vim crowd and the like. Yes, they are right, there is life without nice colors and mousing around development.
Let us not forget: To be somehow useable for insiders is only a first step. To really gain traction a second step must be taken: To be reasonably well useable according to what is common today. Which, I think, translates at least to: vim or emacs modes plus some decent cross platform editor like Scite and a"thin IDE" like geany. From there on it's a matter of taste and religion and - that's an important point! - having a comfortable base useability through the chain we can afford to say "You want X? Go and code it. The tools needed are there.".

A+ -R

On Sun, 1 Sep 2013 17:46:15 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 12:40:00PM +0200, Dicebot wrote:
> > Was pretty happy with vim, grep, gdb and makefiles on Linux. Anyway, key problem (as far as I can see) here is that few of D developers have both experience and personal interest in any IDE/Windows focus as well as related tool stack. D has some nice flavor of anarchy - both like it and consider it a problem.
> 
> The thing is, we keep hearing complaints about how D IDE integration is bad, etc., but it seems like not many people are willing to do something about it. What we need is somebody who is (1) dedicated to D, (2) dedicated to making IDE integration for D work nicely, (3) produce lots of code to make it work.
> 
> Forcing people to change the way to work on D just so you can have IDE integration probably won't have much of an effect. For instance, I wouldn't touch an IDE with a 10-foot pole. Will I still contribute to D? Sure. Will I do something about IDE integration because everyone complains about it? Unlikely. Will I be glad if somebody steps up and say, here's what I've been doing to make D IDE integration better? I'd fully support it. The question is whether there is such a somebody. :)
> 

Yea, that's what I've noticed too, and I've been kinda biting my tongue on it since this thread started. For all the people who complain about their unhappyness with D's IDEs, it's telling how few of them find it important enough to actually *work* on instead of merely complain.

I found some RDMD issues that were blocking me, so I fixed them. I wanted Windows support for DVM, so I added it. I found the zip-creating process to be problematic, so I'm doing something about it (even though it turned out to be bigger than I'd anticipated). Not to say that IDE stuff isn't a much bigger job than those, but come on, we've got what, one person on Visual-D, one on Mono-D, and one who *used* to do XCode-D but gave up because (and I sympathize) he seemed to be the only one who cared enough to tackle it? Surly *something* could be contributed if it really is as big of a problem as people say (and I'm not doubting that it is).

Sure there's the matter of "I just don't have time", but frankly *none*
of us do. I know I sure as hell don't and yet I *make* the time anyway
because it's an important and worthwhile investment for me. And look at
Andrei - he's been was one of the top contributors and leaders and
he did so even while he was working on a PhD *in addition* to a full
time job and a new family. "Don't have time" doesn't count because its
true for all of us.

It just makes IDE users sound like spoiled "gimme gimme gimme", and I'm certainly not going to claim they are, but I just want to point out that's the impression that tends to come across. There's plenty of other areas D's needed improvement, and those people who actually cared have stepped up to the plate - so why aren't (for the most part) those who want IDE improvements? (Naturally I greatly applaud the efforts of the few IDE leaders we do have and have had in the past.)

On 9/2/2013 1:11 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> That was in reply to if DMD was built as a library and included in the IDE. Then
> there wouldn't be a process to end.

Ah, I see.

But that does bring up the possibility of running dmd front end as a separate process, and then using interprocess communication with it?

Isn't Google's Chrome browser built that way?

On 9/1/2013 9:11 PM, Manu wrote:
> If I were gonna be picky, the index seems incomplete. Open it up, click the
> 'index' tab, and type tostringz... it's not there.
> I think it's also very unnatural for a chm to have the module's functions all on
> the one page. Can they be broken up into separate articles?

Of course. The generation of chm is all in the git repository - anyone can fix it if they've a mind to!

On Sun, 01 Sep 2013 19:01:20 +0200
"Volcz" <volcz@kth.se> wrote:

> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 02:05:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > </endrant>
> 
> Completely agree with Manu! I work in the Java + telecom world of programming and recently graduated, so that's the majority of my experience. From what I've seen and experienced is that most today programmers can't live without an IDE and a rock solid tool chain.
> 
> I've seen many solutions posted in this thread to parts of the
> problems, eg auto complete, debugging etc.
> The thing with an IDE is that it has "JUST WORK" it should work
> with all the different components seamlessly.
> The question I would like to ask is how can WE as a COMMUNITY
> improve this situation?
> Official IDE support?
> Official "IDE components"?
> Roadmap?
> 
> Other languages like Java have corporate backing. What difference makes this? Why doesn't we have a roadmap? How does other open source communities work and what can we learn from them?
> 
> Sorry for the un-structure of my post.
> 

To be honest, I never found Eclipse to "just work", especially with anything other than Java. Actually, for anything but Java I always found it to be an unusable nightmare (But good for Java even if less than perfect). Just FWIW.

On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 02:06:55 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Sep 2013 19:01:20 +0200
> "Volcz" <volcz@kth.se> wrote:
>
>> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 02:05:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> > </endrant>
>> 
>> Completely agree with Manu! I work in the Java + telecom world of programming and recently graduated, so that's the majority of my experience. From what I've seen and experienced is that most today programmers can't live without an IDE and a rock solid tool chain.
>> 
>> I've seen many solutions posted in this thread to parts of the problems, eg auto complete, debugging etc.
>> The thing with an IDE is that it has "JUST WORK" it should work with all the different components seamlessly.
>> The question I would like to ask is how can WE as a COMMUNITY improve this situation?
>> Official IDE support?
>> Official "IDE components"?
>> Roadmap?
>> 
>> Other languages like Java have corporate backing. What difference makes this? Why doesn't we have a roadmap? How does other open source communities work and what can we learn from them?
>> 
>> Sorry for the un-structure of my post.
>> 
>
> To be honest, I never found Eclipse to "just work", especially with
> anything other than Java. Actually, for anything but Java I always found
> it to be an unusable nightmare (But good for Java even if less than
> perfect). Just FWIW.

+1

The Eclipse!1Gigabyte.editor is pure bloatware. I don't use GUIs, except for debugging, but if D does get an official GUI please don't let it be Eclipse.

http://www.ihateeclipse.com/

On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 18:12:54 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> I've never heard of libd?  Is it the library-fication of SDC?  I assume this is it? https://github.com/deadalnix/libd

Yep, SDC has been splitted in 3 : SDC itself, libd (parsing/semantic analysis) and libd-llvm (codegen, JIT).

On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 02:05:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
> Debugging:

Well, yes, for premium debugging support, you should probably use C#. Did C++ get to that level, I wonder?

> One more thing:
> I'll just pick one language complaint from the weekend.
> It is how quickly classes became disorganised and difficult to navigate
> (like Java and C#).
> We all wanted to ability to define class member functions outside the class
> definition:
>   class MyClass
>   {
>     void method();
>   }
>
>   void MyClass.method()
>   {
>     //...
>   }
>
> It definitely cost us time simply trying to understand the class layout
> visually (ie, when IDE support is barely available).
> You don't need to see the function bodies in the class definition, you want
> to quickly see what a class has and does.

Does C# solves this problem for you? This is what the members combobox is for, I guess: a clear list of members.

> I might have even just proved to them that they should indeed
> stick with C# (the IDE's work!)... :(


On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 13:19:54 UTC, Manu wrote:
> Hmmm, I found details on the net that recommended adding an [Environment64]
> section, which we did.
>
> I don't seem to have VCINSTALLDIR or WindowsSdkDir variables on my system
> :/ .. that said, VC obviously works on my machine.
> It also seems potentially problematic that a variable would define a single
> install directory, since it's pretty common that programmers have multiple
> versions of VS on their machines.

VS provides shortcuts to the environment setup scripts in the start menu, which sets up the environment variables. That's how it works for C, and it works the same for everything, which uses C.

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:06:53 +0200, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 01 Sep 2013 19:01:20 +0200
> "Volcz" <volcz@kth.se> wrote:
>
>> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 02:05:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> > </endrant>
>>
>> Completely agree with Manu! I work in the Java + telecom world of
>> programming and recently graduated, so that's the majority of my
>> experience. From what I've seen and experienced is that most
>> today programmers can't live without an IDE and a rock solid tool
>> chain.

Unfortunately that is my experience as well, even for senior developers. The ones that are able to get things done without an IDE are most often the 'geeks' 'aces' 'pro's', people with passion for the language/platform.
When D wants to gain broader adoption (beyond the geek/ace/pro) an IDE like experience is indispensable and good debugging facilities is absolute mandatory!

> To be honest, I never found Eclipse to "just work"

Well w.r.t the CDT / linuxtools / pyDEV I can only say it has improved a _lot_ over the last years. In fact it has become my IDE of choice for C/C++/pyhon development on Linux/BSD.