February 25

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.

February 26

On Sunday, 25 February 2024 at 17:25:43 UTC, Don Allen wrote:

>

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.

Great suggestion, I support it.