I'm planning to ditch C++ and come to D. The problem is that I love IDEs for the types of big projects I do, and the C++ IDEs I've used are reasonably good.

The D IDEs that stand out based on their descriptions are Dlang, Coedit with metad, Zeus, Code::blocks, and QtCreator with D extensions.

Visual Studio with D add-ins also seems to be popular, but I'm super down on Visual Studio at the moment because their compiler options are error-prone and it's still Microsoft, so I'd like to explore something else. I've also given up on getting things done with Eclipse. It looks nice, but the times I've tried it, I had to ditch it for Netbeans or Visual Studio.

There aren't any real reviews on how these things perform for big projects in a professional environment. I'm planning on starting my search with QtCreator. However, there are many tools that go into debugging, profiling analysis, git integration, etc. that seem to require a lot of configuration, and things that just don't play well together. Since there are many options, it would be great if people could post their recommendations after having tried some of these tools. It would save me a lot of time to clone a few setups rather than discover the pieces that work well together on my own.

I'm looking for things like testimony that your setup worked well on a big project, and links to sites where I should install stuff, and some idea what value each component brings to setup, even if it's not that extensively used. I really can't find this sort of detail anywhere, which is why I'm asking here.

In particular, Zeus looks interesting, but from the Zeus website, it also looks like a maze of add-on scripts, with no guarantee that they work that well. Is anyone using this?

On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 20:23:34 UTC, Guido wrote:
> I'm planning to ditch C++ and come to D. The problem is that I love IDEs for the types of big projects I do, and the C++ IDEs I've used are reasonably good.
>
> The D IDEs that stand out based on their descriptions are Dlang, Coedit with metad, Zeus, Code::blocks, and QtCreator with D extensions.
>
> Visual Studio with D add-ins also seems to be popular, but I'm super down on Visual Studio at the moment because their compiler options are error-prone and it's still Microsoft, so I'd like to explore something else. I've also given up on getting things done with Eclipse. It looks nice, but the times I've tried it, I had to ditch it for Netbeans or Visual Studio.
>
> There aren't any real reviews on how these things perform for big projects in a professional environment. I'm planning on starting my search with QtCreator. However, there are many tools that go into debugging, profiling analysis, git integration, etc. that seem to require a lot of configuration, and things that just don't play well together. Since there are many options, it would be great if people could post their recommendations after having tried some of these tools. It would save me a lot of time to clone a few setups rather than discover the pieces that work well together on my own.
>
> I'm looking for things like testimony that your setup worked well on a big project, and links to sites where I should install stuff, and some idea what value each component brings to setup, even if it's not that extensively used. I really can't find this sort of detail anywhere, which is why I'm asking here.
>
> In particular, Zeus looks interesting, but from the Zeus website, it also looks like a maze of add-on scripts, with no guarantee that they work that well. Is anyone using this?

> In particular, Zeus looks interesting, but from the Zeus website, it also looks like a maze of add-on scripts, with no guarantee that they work that well. Is anyone using this?

As the author of the Zeus IDE I can say the Zeus support for D is probably a little outdated :(

Some time back, effort was made to see if Zeus could supported tools like DCD, DScanner etc and I suspect the scripts you are referring to relate to those tools.

But as you have suggested, those scripts are now showing their age, just for the fact that Zeus has moved on, no doubt D has moved on and more importantly tools like DCD have moved on.

As such I suspect those Zeus scripts are out of date and showing their age.

On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 20:23:34 UTC, Guido wrote:
> Coedit with metad,

metad is not really useful anymore. It was created at a time where CE didn't handle DUB projects (2014). I still maintain it for my own usage, that's the only reason. It's also been usefull 3 or 4 times to detect DMD regressions and more recently to test a new feature (project groups, batch compilation):

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/16154339/17611474/e71e9796-6047-11e6-9747-d6380d289a07.png

Anyway, the CE toolchain is quite simple:

- compiler: either DMD/LDC/GDC, called via DUB or via a custom format.
- completion: DCD (no srprise here, like 90 % of the D editors).
- code explorer: custom program based on libdparse.
- git integration: possible with the custom tools, e.g on my setup i can open git gui on the active project with a single click | shortcut
- no support for debuging, though with the custom tools it's possible to launch a GDB front-end with the right option (e.g `<CPO>` => output filename). More generally the custom tools are not a trival feature. Real things are possible, it's not decoration.

usually everything works out-of-the-box, assuming at least DMD is already setup.
only Dscanner must be setup manually, but it's not a central component, it's just used to perform the static checks, without visual feedback in the editor (i.e read wave under the problem) but rather a dump of the output stream in the messages.

As for a professional usage of CE i didn't detect any clue indicating this (e.g inside bug reports or after annoucment, nobody never tolds "**we** would need this or that").

On Saturday, 13 August 2016 at 17:51:30 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 20:23:34 UTC, Guido wrote:
>> Coedit with metad,
>
> metad is not really useful anymore. It was created at a time where CE didn't handle DUB projects (2014). I still maintain it for my own usage, that's the only reason. It's also been usefull 3 or 4 times to detect DMD regressions and more recently to test a new feature (project groups, batch compilation):
>
> https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/16154339/17611474/e71e9796-6047-11e6-9747-d6380d289a07.png

oh no the typo...

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/16154339/17657022/526b794a-62c0-11e6-9f79-522490137670.png