So, since I've been off the wagon for a couple of years; VisualD, which
used to be ROCK SOLID seems to have suffered major regressions in almost
every aspect of its functionality.
I think it's largely related to dmd-as-a-lib now being the foundation for a
lot of tooling, and it's just criminally unstable...

Rainer used to maintain his own semantic analyser used for formatting,
auto-complete and suggestions, code navigation, and debugging; it worked
beautifully! But a couple years back, VisualD was switched to use DMD
frontend for those duties, and it barely works anymore.
The old bespoke code is still available, but it's so out of date with the
modern language that it's not usable anymore.

...to make this worse; Rainer has effectively checked-out too. We've lost another one of our finest.

This is a general category of problem that's been an issue for a long time; having unfunded one-man efforts maintain essential infrastructure. I wonder if there are any opportunities available to do a lot better here. Does the dlang foundation have any budget for critical infrastructure? And/or anyone that would even consider working on the boring but essential stuff?

Is there actually anyone here who develops on Windows? I don't understand how it could have regressed so far, unless it's just that nobody is using it.

I now recognise a really major conundrum; I've recently returned to D to
start a company with a greenfields project. VisualD failing is essentially
terminal. I'm not sure what to do.
I don't have time available to try and pick up the project and work it
myself, but the current state is really pushing at the border of forcing me
to completely rewrite all my code in C++ on account of ecosystem
reliability.

Ideally, we really need to be properly funding development for critical infrastructure... but I'm not sure we've ever had a sufficient budget to maintain that sort of commitment.

On 15/10/2024 10:07 PM, Manu wrote:
> ...to make this worse; Rainer has effectively checked-out too. We've lost another one of our finest.

He implemented the negative annotation exportation switches for dmd at end of last year.

(dllimport and visibility)

Druntime/phobos are not currently offered as a shared library though.

That was a MAJOR contribution to dmd.

> I now recognise a really major conundrum; I've recently returned to D to start a company with a greenfields project. VisualD failing is essentially terminal. I'm not sure what to do. I don't have time available to try and pick up the project and work it myself, but the current state is really pushing at the border of forcing me to completely rewrite all my code in C++ on account of ecosystem reliability.

Over the past year, VisualD has broken a couple of times.

The fix appears to update & recompile it.

Personally I only use VisualD for debugging, and Intellij for development.

On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 at 19:16, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 15/10/2024 10:07 PM, Manu wrote:
> > ...to make this worse; Rainer has effectively checked-out too. We've lost another one of our finest.
>
> He implemented the negative annotation exportation switches for dmd at end of last year.
>
> (dllimport and visibility)
>
> Druntime/phobos are not currently offered as a shared library though.
>
> That was a MAJOR contribution to dmd.
>

Oh I know it... I mean, I have always said Rainer is one of the greatest,
most competent, most high impact, and most quiet and humble contributors
we've ever had... but I'm not sure what your point is. He seems to have
checked out... that's fine, he's welcome to do so, but it reinforces a
serious problem.
Key-person risk is a HUGE practical problem for D :/

> I now recognise a really major conundrum; I've recently returned to D to
> > start a company with a greenfields project. VisualD failing is essentially terminal. I'm not sure what to do. I don't have time available to try and pick up the project and work it myself, but the current state is really pushing at the border of forcing me to completely rewrite all my code in C++ on account of ecosystem
> reliability.
>
> Over the past year, VisualD has broken a couple of times.
>
> The fix appears to update & recompile it.
>

To be clear, it's broken in almost every single semantic-related task that
it performs.
The way you describe here is because MS have changed their VS release model
so make major revision increments every couple of months rather than every
couple of years... and so yes, it needs to be regularly recompiled, but
that's not the cause of any functionality regression.

Personally I only use VisualD for debugging, and Intellij for development.
>

It's still the most competent debugger on earth.

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:07:12 UTC, Manu wrote:

> Is there actually anyone here who develops on Windows? I don't understand how it could have regressed so far, unless it's just that nobody is using it.

There seem to be near-zero users of D on Windows, and they are not using VisualD. I tried it recently but had to return to VS Code (which is, btw, currently unusable on Ubuntu 22.10, don't upgrade).

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:45:17 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:

> Ubuntu 22.10
24.10

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:07:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
> This is a general category of problem that's been an issue for a long time; having unfunded one-man efforts maintain essential infrastructure. I wonder if there are any opportunities available to do a lot better here. Does the dlang foundation have any budget for critical infrastructure? And/or anyone that would even consider working on the boring but essential stuff?

Got a spare 500k/USD/year? That's probably what it would take to staff the essentials.

> Is there actually anyone here who develops on Windows? I don't understand how it could have regressed so far, unless it's just that nobody is using it.

I work on Windows, but I've never used VisualD, just VSCode.

On 15/10/2024 10:42 PM, Manu wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 at 19:16, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com <mailto:digitalmars- d@puremagic.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 15/10/2024 10:07 PM, Manu wrote:
>      > ...to make this worse; Rainer has effectively checked-out too. We've
>      > lost another one of our finest.
> 
>     He implemented the negative annotation exportation switches for dmd at
>     end of last year.
> 
>     (dllimport and visibility)
> 
>     Druntime/phobos are not currently offered as a shared library though.
> 
>     That was a MAJOR contribution to dmd.
> 
> 
> Oh I know it... I mean, I have always said Rainer is one of the greatest, most competent, most high impact, and most quiet and humble contributors we've ever had... but I'm not sure what your point is. He seems to have checked out... that's fine, he's welcome to do so, but it reinforces a serious problem.
> Key-person risk is a HUGE practical problem for D :/

More like too busy. Which is not a good thing at all.

>      > I now recognise a really major conundrum; I've recently returned
>     to D to
>      > start a company with a greenfields project. VisualD failing is
>      > essentially terminal. I'm not sure what to do. I don't have time
>      > available to try and pick up the project and work it myself, but the
>      > current state is really pushing at the border of forcing me to
>      > completely rewrite all my code in C++ on account of ecosystem
>     reliability.
> 
>     Over the past year, VisualD has broken a couple of times.
> 
>     The fix appears to update & recompile it.
> 
> 
> To be clear, it's broken in almost every single semantic-related task that it performs.
> The way you describe here is because MS have changed their VS release model so make major revision increments every couple of months rather than every couple of years... and so yes, it needs to be regularly recompiled, but that's not the cause of any functionality regression.

But yes, that is basically what happened around a year ago.

Debugging didn't work. I had to disable the plugin it was so bad.

On 15/10/2024 11:20 PM, ryuukk_ wrote:
>     Got a spare 500k/USD/year? That's probably what it would take to
>     staff the essentials.
> 
> Typical american mindset, "we only hire people from the Bay Area or Washington, and they cost us 500k USD a year, deal with it", "oh we out of funds, call the VCs we need to hire 100 more people"

You need to reread this. This is a baseless accusation, when Adam was talking about multiple roles.