The Descent plugin for Eclipse provides an IDE for writing, launching and debugging code in D.

Explanations on how to get it from within Eclipse are here:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent

This is mainly a bugfix/maintenance release. Much care has been taken to improve memory usage and speed as well.

However, there are some new features:
 - You can configure each project separatedly.
 - There's the concept of "Active Project": the active version and debug identifiers are taken from this project (they are used for greying out code and doing semantic resolution).
 - File imports (import("filename") now work. Their lookup path is taken from the same paths as the include path. (sorry, I'm lazy for UI stuff)
 - Improved semantic coloring.
 - Improved autocompletion.
 - Now op* methods doesn't show in autocompletion, except you explicity request them writing anything that start with "op".
 - Improved "go to definition".
 - Improved messages when hovering an identifier.

The previous release was really buggy. I think of it as the answer to the question "Can it be done?". This release answers the question "Can it be well done?". Obviously, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

By default, semantic errors are turned off. You can still turn them on, but this is an experimental feature and probably won't work correctly most of the time.

Current Descent users need to close every project, open them again, and make a full rebuild in order to get things adapted to the new code. Also, if you had any library or compiler configured, you will need to delete them and create them again, because their search index is not compatible with this version. So maybe the best thing you can do is to reinstall the product.

Any suggestion, critic or bug report is welcome. You can use:
- the forums: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=107
- trac: http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent/report?action=new
- irc: at freenode, #d.descent

Enjoy!

> Enjoy!

Well, thanks. I already do! YEAH.

On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:10 -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:

> The Descent plugin for Eclipse provides an IDE for writing, launching and debugging code in D.
> 
> Explanations on how to get it from within Eclipse are here:
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent
> 
> This is mainly a bugfix/maintenance release. Much care has been taken to improve memory usage and speed as well.
> 
> However, there are some new features:
>   - You can configure each project separatedly. - There's the concept of
>   "Active Project": the active version and
> debug identifiers are taken from this project (they are used for greying
> out code and doing semantic resolution).
>   - File imports (import("filename") now work. Their lookup path is
> taken from the same paths as the include path. (sorry, I'm lazy for UI
> stuff)
>   - Improved semantic coloring.
>   - Improved autocompletion.
>   - Now op* methods doesn't show in autocompletion, except you explicity
> request them writing anything that start with "op".
>   - Improved "go to definition".
>   - Improved messages when hovering an identifier.
> 
> The previous release was really buggy. I think of it as the answer to the question "Can it be done?". This release answers the question "Can it be well done?". Obviously, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
> 
> By default, semantic errors are turned off. You can still turn them on, but this is an experimental feature and probably won't work correctly most of the time.
> 
> Current Descent users need to close every project, open them again, and make a full rebuild in order to get things adapted to the new code. Also, if you had any library or compiler configured, you will need to delete them and create them again, because their search index is not compatible with this version. So maybe the best thing you can do is to reinstall the product.
> 
> Any suggestion, critic or bug report is welcome. You can use: - the forums: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=107 - trac: http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent/report?action=new - irc: at freenode, #d.descent
> 
> Enjoy!

Good stuff!  What are your plans for D2 support?

I've uploaded some short videos in my YouTube account that show some of Descent's features. I'll upload more as time goes by.

http://www.youtube.com/asterite

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> The Descent plugin for Eclipse provides an IDE for writing, launching and debugging code in D.

Graham St Jack wrote:
> On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:10 -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> Enjoy!
> 
> Good stuff!  What are your plans for D2 support?

Maybe for the next release... It's just about porting DMD's code. If I do that in a rush, it gets boring, so I try to do that from time to time. Robert can agree with me. :-)

Ary Borenszweig Wrote:

> The Descent plugin for Eclipse provides an IDE for writing, launching and debugging code in D.
> 
> Explanations on how to get it from within Eclipse are here:
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent
> 
> This is mainly a bugfix/maintenance release. Much care has been taken to improve memory usage and speed as well.


Eclipse refused to acknowledge that an update was available.  A simple uninstall and reinstall of Eclipse  with Ubuntu packages left too much old config information around, so I did a more aggressive removal followed by a reinstallation.  Now Eclipse crashes on startup.

Does anyone know what I might have broke on my system?  My aggressive uninstall was telling ubuntu to remove all eclipse related packages completely (delete configs too) and then used find to locate missed eclipse related files and delete them too.  I then used the package system to install the eclipse package.

Ary Borenszweig Wrote:

> I've uploaded some short videos in my YouTube account that show some of Descent's features. I'll upload more as time goes by.
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/asterite

Is it possible to make the videos iPhone compatible? http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-ipod-video-formats-and-display-resolutions/

In the past, ffmpeg was a painless way of doing conversions.  I know there are ubuntu packages for it when the right source is enabled.

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> Graham St Jack wrote:
>> On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:10 -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>> Enjoy!
>>
>> Good stuff!  What are your plans for D2 support?
> 
> Maybe for the next release... It's just about porting DMD's code. If I do that in a rush, it gets boring, so I try to do that from time to time. Robert can agree with me. :-)

Out of curiosity: why not library-ize the DMD front-end and distribute it along with a JNI wrapper?

It would take some work to get it properly wrapped and ported to your target platforms (especially to OSX since there are few D'ers on that platform), but the end result would keep you from having to trail compiler releases and bug updates by a full porting cycle.  Also, at least where Eclipse is concerned, OSGi has your back with making sure that the right binary lib is used for JNI.

Just thinking out loud,
- Pragma

pragma escribió:
> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> Graham St Jack wrote:
>>> On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:10 -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>>> Enjoy!
>>>
>>> Good stuff!  What are your plans for D2 support?
>>
>> Maybe for the next release... It's just about porting DMD's code. If I do that in a rush, it gets boring, so I try to do that from time to time. Robert can agree with me. :-)
> 
> Out of curiosity: why not library-ize the DMD front-end and distribute it along with a JNI wrapper?
> 
> It would take some work to get it properly wrapped and ported to your target platforms (especially to OSX since there are few D'ers on that platform), but the end result would keep you from having to trail compiler releases and bug updates by a full porting cycle.  Also, at least where Eclipse is concerned, OSGi has your back with making sure that the right binary lib is used for JNI.
> 
> Just thinking out loud,
> - Pragma

We thought of that, but I think it's harder to do than the current approach. The code from DMD was changed in a lot of ways: source range information has been added to nodes, the visitor pattern has been applied, the problem reporting is different, some char[] handling optimizations added. In the end, it will be like programming in C++. And... C++ doesn't have *good* refactoring support, find all references, autocompletion, etc. And also, a build of the JNI wrapper must be done, and programing in JNI is not fun: creating an instance of a class or calling a method is terribly verbose and error-prone, specially if you rename/move a class used by JNI.

And now, it's not hard to update: just diff and port the differences. The hardest part was the beginning, when we had to figure out how to translate gotos, passing by reference, etc. :-)

Jason House wrote:

> Ary Borenszweig Wrote:
> 
>> The Descent plugin for Eclipse provides an IDE for writing, launching and debugging code in D.
>> 
>> Explanations on how to get it from within Eclipse are here:
>> 
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent
>> 
>> This is mainly a bugfix/maintenance release. Much care has been taken to improve memory usage and speed as well.
> 
> 
> Eclipse refused to acknowledge that an update was available.  A simple uninstall and reinstall of Eclipse  with Ubuntu packages left too much old config information around, so I did a more aggressive removal followed by a reinstallation.  Now Eclipse crashes on startup.
> 
> Does anyone know what I might have broke on my system?  My aggressive uninstall was telling ubuntu to remove all eclipse related packages completely (delete configs too) and then used find to locate missed eclipse related files and delete them too.  I then used the package system to install the eclipse package.

The following worked for me to fix my configuration:
sudo apt-get purge eclipse
sudo apt-get auto-remove
sudo apt-get install eclipse