September 12, 2004
In article <ci00oi$89c$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Sean Kelly says...
>
>Agreed.  I think Eclipse may be D's best shot at a native IDE, but I haven't been able to get the D plugin working yet (though I hope to find more time to play with it in the next week or so).  Again, this is something that the community could provide, as it isn't really necessary to get the compiler finished and such.

I just came back from a solid hour of arguing with eclipse.  In my humblest opinion, I think D deserves better than that.  Caveat being that I seem to have reluctantly become an emacs fag*, and can't get my brain around any of the Real IDEs I've recently tried.  Eclipse, however, seems particularly disagreeable. Whereas the alternatives I've tried, primarily anjuta, merely felt unfinished in this or that regard, eclipse feels over done.  *Way* overdone.  Whenever I encounter the behemoth, I'm reminded of the Monty Python bit with the corpulent fellow who eats just a lil' too much.  And remember, this is the perspective of an *EMACS* user.  I'm no stranger to "big."

* If you take offense of my use of the word "fag" because of it's colloquial use as a disparaging remark for those with a minority sexual orientation, I suggest lightening up; I certainly don't mean for the locution to be interpreted in such a manner, so don't.  On the other hand, if you're offended by the fact that I'm an emacs user, don't be; I feel like a heroin addict, and I'd do pretty much anything to kick this habit.  Emacs is stuck in 197*, and it chaps my ass. However, it gets the gist of things *very* right, and I think I'd have an easier time dragging emacs into the 21st century than adding what's missing to the alternatives (and I'm not referring to Gnus *shudder*).


September 12, 2004
Andy Friesen wrote:
> Walter is the only one who can make improvements to the compiler itself, 

Hm, why is that the case?

-ben
September 12, 2004
ninjadroid wrote:
> In article <ci00oi$89c$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Sean Kelly says...
> 
>>Agreed.  I think Eclipse may be D's best shot at a native IDE, but I haven't
>>been able to get the D plugin working yet (though I hope to find more time to
>>play with it in the next week or so).  Again, this is something that the
>>community could provide, as it isn't really necessary to get the compiler
>>finished and such.
> 
> 
> I just came back from a solid hour of arguing with eclipse.  In my humblest
> opinion, I think D deserves better than that.  Caveat being that I seem to have
> reluctantly become an emacs fag*, and can't get my brain around any of the Real
> IDEs I've recently tried.  Eclipse, however, seems particularly disagreeable.
> Whereas the alternatives I've tried, primarily anjuta, merely felt unfinished in
> this or that regard, eclipse feels over done.  *Way* overdone.  Whenever I
> encounter the behemoth, I'm reminded of the Monty Python bit with the corpulent
> fellow who eats just a lil' too much.  And remember, this is the perspective of
> an *EMACS* user.  I'm no stranger to "big."

I use emacs and like it a lot, but its interactive debugging support is pretty sparse (last I saw it just had a bit of gdb integration). Eclipse seemed promising because it's essentially an IDE toolkit, but I agree that it's kind of much.  On the emacs end, if you're inclined to improve the D syntax hilighting mode for emacs, please do.  I've actually fallen back on UltraEdit recently because emacs does odd things with D source and it's gotten irritating.


Sean
September 12, 2004
[snip]

>  On the emacs end, if you're inclined to
> improve the D syntax hilighting mode for emacs, please do.  I've
> actually fallen back on UltraEdit recently because emacs does odd things
> with D source and it's gotten irritating.

I second that. Anyone willing to improve the emacs mode please feel free to jump on in. The current support is 99.9% the C/C++/Java engine so it doesn't handle D all that well and my emacs lisp is... well... terrible.

-Ben
September 12, 2004
> I hesitated to submit the 2 MIID that I did. Clearly they were at least somewhat outside what "The WB" was asking. And I appreciate your patient, gentle reply to this newbie.

Actually I probably shouldn't have responded to your post since this thread is really for feedback to Walter. Sorry for singling your post out but I agree the topic of a GUI framework is very important and I couldn't resist commenting. I had the same impression you did when I first started learning about D and not seeing anything about GUI frameworks. Your comments provide an important "reality check" for what is expected nowadays in a language and the libs and tools.

September 12, 2004
"Walter" <newshound@digitalmars.com> escribió en el mensaje
news:cht9gl$20m8$1@digitaldaemon.com
| So I'd like to kick off this thread as an opportunity for all to post their
| two Most Important Issues for D with respect to getting 1.0 done. By MIID, I
| mean pragmatic things like:
|
| 1) compiler bugs
| 2) language shortcomings with no reasonable workarounds
| 3) issues that are fundamentally blocking projects from using or proceeding
| with D
| 4) severe library faults

Since 0.99, DMD (Windows) has a bug which I can't reproduce where it suddenly
crashes where it didn't use to. I'm still trying to reduce it a send a bug
report.
So my MIID is that: consistent behavior from one release to the other unless an
explicit change has been made.
The other one would be consistency across Phobos. Things like MemoryStream,
MMFile and OutBuffer should be reviewed, unified, etc. imports made private,
etc.
Keep up the good work, Walter!

-----------------------
Carlos Santander Bernal


September 12, 2004
"Sai" <Sai_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:chvfss$17j$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> 1. Put "D language and compiler" in maintainance mode ASAP.
> 2. Improve Phobos. Phobos right now looks like some
> bunch of crap put together.

Lots of people have commented that Phobos is crap. But I need specifics.


September 12, 2004
Walter, I think I should apologise, I don't mean to be so harsh.

Actually, I feel that the "D Language" is such an achievement, it is something which I have been looking for since last 7 years.

Language is great, compiler is great, but somehow I feel that phobos got neglected.

Specifically,

1. Where is DTL ? Why there are no direct links from website
to DTL ? Why should I dig NG for downloading DTL. Why can't
we make DTL part of phobos ? No wonder so many versions of
miniTL, xTl yTl's are floating around, infact I have my
own version of TL in D !!

2. I feel that the amount of API is very less. The API which is
currently in phobos seems to be there just to help you in
writing compiler. it wasn't of much use to me. I had to
write lot of classes when I tried to port my code to D.
For example, we don't have 'Timer' classes yet.

3. Documentation is very bad. I think any powerful API is useless
unless it is well documented. Lacking of "Search" facility
or "Index" in D documentation is a huge discouraging factor.

For D 1.0 above things are enough for me.

Regards
Sai




In article <ci0gf5$18rn$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter says...
>
>
>"Sai" <Sai_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:chvfss$17j$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> 1. Put "D language and compiler" in maintainance mode ASAP.
>> 2. Improve Phobos. Phobos right now looks like some
>> bunch of crap put together.
>
>Lots of people have commented that Phobos is crap. But I need specifics.
>
>


September 12, 2004
"Carlos Santander B." <carlos8294@msn.com> wrote in message news:ci0esc$s55$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> "Walter" <newshound@digitalmars.com> escribió en el mensaje
> news:cht9gl$20m8$1@digitaldaemon.com
> | So I'd like to kick off this thread as an opportunity for all to post their
> | two Most Important Issues for D with respect to getting 1.0 done. By MIID, I
> | mean pragmatic things like:
> |
> | 1) compiler bugs
> | 2) language shortcomings with no reasonable workarounds
> | 3) issues that are fundamentally blocking projects from using or proceeding
> | with D
> | 4) severe library faults
>
> Since 0.99, DMD (Windows) has a bug which I can't reproduce where it suddenly
> crashes where it didn't use to. I'm still trying to reduce it a send a bug
> report.
> So my MIID is that: consistent behavior from one release to the other unless an
> explicit change has been made.
> The other one would be consistency across Phobos. Things like MemoryStream,
> MMFile and OutBuffer should be reviewed, unified, etc. imports made private,
> etc.

Carlos, excellent point! I'd planned to do exactly that once I've done a review of Exceptions and Mango (which I'm only part way through, and have been promising Kris for, oh, about 5 months!). If someone else wants to do that, though, that's fine by me.

If no-one else takes it up by about this time next month, I'll do it. I will post a message like the chrebn$12f7$1@digitaldaemon.com, asking for input, and then do a review, debate with big-W, and release for group review.

Matthew


September 12, 2004
>Lots of people have commented that Phobos is crap. But I need specifics.

What I think about it:

No more c style things like time_t, printf, or that kind of things. It'd be also nice if it would be a whole fish rather than a school of fish. Also it looks like it's code could need a revamp. Containers should also be embedded, though I don't have a problem with that since I have a great time making my own containers ;) D's standard functionality sort of patches that problem up, though that doesn't mean it doesn't need it. How common is it that you want to push items on an array? That you want to sort an array, or whatever?