On 1 September 2013 13:53, Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry about the nonsensical reply, the web interface was acting up... this is the intended reply.


On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 02:05:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
The only compiler you can realistically use productively in windows is
DMD-Win64, and that doesn't work out of the box.

Why didn't you go with DMD-Win32? Because of OMF? implib and/or objconv is a hassle but probably less of a hassle than using the nascent DMD-Win64.

Ummm... just no. I'm just not even gonna touch that. It just feels 'fake', and I have no confidence in it at all.
Maybe I'm being difficult, but I just want to work in the same world as all the other existing code on my ecosystem.
I'm not making major concessions like that for the niche language when everything else is already working well.

If that suggestion works flawlessly, then DMD-Win32 should be enhanced to embed those tools, and convert COFF libs to OMF automatically at link time.

Overwhelmingly, the biggest complaint was a lack of symbolic information to
assist with auto-completion. Visual-D tries valiantly, but it falls quite
short of the mark.
This goes back to the threads where the IDE guys are writing their own
parsers, when really, DMD should be able to be built as a lib, with an API
designed for using DMD as a lib/plugin.

Although I'm not convinced auto-completion is a vital feature (Microsoft's C++ IntelliSense is shit too), I agree that any time spent on custom parsers and best-effort semantic analysis is a complete waste of time. The only semantic analysis engine that is going to be sufficiently good for D is one from a compiler front-end. Apart from DMD, it's worth taking a look at SDC for this.

Microsoft's C# intellisense is absolutely spectacular, and there's no reason D couldn't be just as good. I think the deficiencies in the C++ experience come from the language it's self. C++ offers the opportunity for too many ambiguities. The preprocessor has gotta hinder the intellisense engine for one.

some windows dev's want a CHM that looks like
the typical Microsoft doc's people are used to. Those that aren't familiar
with the CHM viewer; it's just HTML but with a nice index + layout tree.

dmd2\windows\bin\d.chm

Noted. I suggest the installer put a link in the start menu :)

Yes, we hit DMD bugs, like the one with opaque structs which required
extensive work-arounds.
  struct MyStruct;
  MyStruct*[] = new MyStruct*[n];

I'm not sure this is a bug. How do you default initialize an array of structs you don't know the .init values of?

It's an array of pointers. Pointers always .init to null...?