On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:05 PM Greatsam4sure via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 8 July 2020 at 01:26:55 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 10:00 PM JN via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Saturday, 4 July 2020 at 13:00:16 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> >> > See https://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/VersionHistory.html for
> the complete list of changes.
> >> >
> >> > Cheers,
> >> > Rainer
> >>
> >> Anyone who uses VisualD and Code-D can compare the two? (Yes, I know the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).
> >>
> >
> > The difference is night vs day... VisualD is, by far, like
> > REALLY FAR, the
> > most mature and useful IDE and debug environment for D.
> > TL;DR: if you are a D dev, and you use Windows, you should
> > definitely try
> > Visual Studio + VisualD. I for one couldn't work without it!
>
>
> VodualD is great. I appreciate the people behind it. Great thanks to your all.
>
> Setting up visual D is not user friendly. I downloaded visualD+dmd+LDC since version 0.52 I could not run ordinary Hello World. All kind of errors. I seek help on the learn group several times to not help. My experience with visual D is bad.
>

I've been testing the first-install process for almost 10 years.
I haven't had any problems with first-install for at least 6 years.

Make sure to create bug reports for issues like that; what version of VS are you using? Are there any non-standard elements to your installation or dev environment?

On Wednesday, 8 July 2020 at 01:26:55 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 10:00 PM JN via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 4 July 2020 at 13:00:16 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>> > See https://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/VersionHistory.html for the complete list of changes.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Rainer
>>
>> Anyone who uses VisualD and Code-D can compare the two? (Yes, I know the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).
>>
>
> The difference is night vs day... VisualD is, by far, like REALLY FAR, the
> most mature and useful IDE and debug environment for D.

That's depends on what you're comfortable with and if you're a core windows guy... how you use it too.

I would say if you're on Linux/Windows, try VS code, if you're Windows only and like Visual Studio, then VisualD. The two are great.


There's others too who're ok with vim, emacs, etc for D. I believe it depends on how you use it and what you're used to.


But generally I recommend VisualD or Code-d (VS code).

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 10:15 PM aberba via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 8 July 2020 at 01:26:55 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 10:00 PM JN via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Saturday, 4 July 2020 at 13:00:16 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> >> > See https://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/VersionHistory.html for
> the complete list of changes.
> >> >
> >> > Cheers,
> >> > Rainer
> >>
> >> Anyone who uses VisualD and Code-D can compare the two? (Yes, I know the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).
> >>
> >
> > The difference is night vs day... VisualD is, by far, like
> > REALLY FAR, the
> > most mature and useful IDE and debug environment for D.
>
> That's depends on what you're comfortable with and if you're a core windows guy... how you use it too.
>

Not really. VisualD is objectively the most functional and competent
IDE/Debugger solution, BY FAR.
It's not an opinion, it's a measurable fact.

Obviously, if you are into vim/emacs/whatever, then you don't actually
really care much about IDE support and debugging, and in that case, this
question is not relevant to you.
I agree that Code-D + VSCode is probably the second best solution, but
there's really no comparison; the debugger is a kind of funny/sad joke, the
D debug experience is poorly integrated, and the intellisense/autocomplete
is nowhere near the same standard. There's no competition.

Code-D is great work, but it's still catching up, and it may never do so because VSCode just has an embarrassingly bad debugger :(

On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 00:03:02 UTC, Manu wrote:
>
> Not really. VisualD is objectively the most functional and competent
> IDE/Debugger solution, BY FAR.
> It's not an opinion, it's a measurable fact.
>
> Obviously, if you are into vim/emacs/whatever, then you don't actually
> really care much about IDE support and debugging, and in that case, this
> question is not relevant to you.
> I agree that Code-D + VSCode is probably the second best solution, but
> there's really no comparison; the debugger is a kind of funny/sad joke, the
> D debug experience is poorly integrated, and the intellisense/autocomplete
> is nowhere near the same standard. There's no competition.
>
> Code-D is great work, but it's still catching up, and it may never do so because VSCode just has an embarrassingly bad debugger :(

Professionally, I've used Visual Studio for the first 3-4 years of my career. Back then the company I worked for was a MSFT partner, so we all had the Professional or Ultimate edition that had all the bells and whistles. I agree that VS has probably the best debugger, though I'd actually say that the debugging experience is much better with C# than C++. Debugging C++ (with /Od and with or without /Zo) feels wanky compared C# which has always been rock-solid.

However, I've since moved to Linux and I couldn't be happier. I haven't had to fire up Windows for the past 1-2 years. On my work machine, I neither have a dual boot, nor even a Windows VM, just Linux. Windows really sucks as a dev environment. And I'm telling this as someone who would for years be one of the first among my colleagues and friends to install the latest Windows, VS, MSVC, .NET FX /.NET Core preview builds, Chocolatey, vcpkg, WSL, Windows Terminal, Cygwin, Msys, Msys2 and so on.
The only salvation I see is WSL2, but still, it's overall a pretty bad dev UX. No matter how much effort is put in a GUI IDE, nothing beets Unix as an IDE and especially modern distros, such as NixOS (my daily driver). Yes, it takes much more effort for beginners than VS, but it's all worth it.

Coming back to VS Code, for what I do on my daily job it's really destroying the "real" VS:
* It's cross-platform, so I can take my dev environment on whichever OS I work.
* You don't need to create a "project file" to effectively work on a project
* On Windows, admin user is not necessary to install & update. This makes the update process unnoticeable, where VS, before their new modular installer was unbearably slow (1h min).
* Start time is much better. Additionally, in many cases, you don't need to restart when you install/uninstall an extension - this make's it much easier to test extensions for 1-2 mins and then throw them away.
* The extensions integrate much better - in many cases it takes < 10 secs to install something, while with VS it takes at least 1min in my experience, sometimes even several minutes, depending on the size of the extension.
* VS Code integrates much better with the system - on Windows you just right-click to open a folder or file and it's opened in less then 1-3secs. In the terminal you just type `code <path>` and it's done. I know this works already with full VS and I have used it, but its much slower startup time defeats this workflow.
* For beginners (which don't know vim), VS Code is actually not a bad choice as the default git editor (it's just `git config --global core.editor "code --wait"`) (e.g. for interactive rebase, writing commit messages, git add -p edit, and so on)
* Given that I spend at least at 30-70% of my time in the terminal, VS Code's integrated terminal is much better than whatever VS has had when I tried it over the years. I'd like the perf to be better with vim and git diff, but it's very workable.
* vscodevim still has much to be desired, but it's miles ahead then the alternative extensions for the full VS
* The editor as a whole is much *easier* to customize and I feel that in the past 1-2 years it has started to be *more* customizable compared to VS
* Extensions like Remote development for containers and SSH are live savers. I couldn't live without them (if I have to use a GUI editor / IDE).
* The overall language support is much better. VS does a couple of languages really well, but VSCode has a much richer extensions gallery and supports many more languages.
* Of course, I'm biased, since I haven't had to use a debugger in the past several months, but these days I'd always pick an editor with a much better extensibility story because many of the things I need daily I haven't found alternatives for in VS.

----

Rainer, the work you have done with VisualD is astounding! I have always been extremely impressed by the progress you have been making over the years!

(Of course, not a high priority by any means, but) it would be great to have VisualD's engine for VS Code! I know that a large part of VisualD is very tightly coupled with VS, but I think that anything that could be made a bit more independent and reusable would be a plus.
What I really wish is we had a single shared codebase for dlang editor support, that could be shared among editor extension writers, instead of having many community members working on competing solutions.

On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 08:40:24 UTC, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
>>
>> Code-D is great work, but it's still catching up, and it may never do so because VSCode just has an embarrassingly bad debugger :(
>
> Professionally, I've used Visual Studio for the first 3-4 years of my career. Back then the company I worked for was a MSFT partner, so we all had the Professional or Ultimate edition that had all the bells and whistles. I agree that VS has probably the best debugger, though I'd actually say that the debugging experience is much better with C# than C++. Debugging C++ (with /Od and with or without /Zo) feels wanky compared C# which has always been rock-solid.

s/wanky/kind of janky/

FWIW, I actually agree with everything you said about linux as a dev environment vs windows. But that wasn't the question... as an IDE and debugger integration, there is absolutely no comparison to VisualD, not by miles.

It would be really cool if parts from VisualD were more suitable for
VSCode, but I can't see that being easy or practical.
One is the Concorde integration, which is pretty deep, and GDB is just not
even remotely as good, and the vscode debug UX is embarrassing by contrast.
Then the general autocomplete engine, which is fairly dependent on the
detail expressed in the project files. While vcxproj files are very shit to
write, it's much easier on the tooling than trying to extract sufficient
build config from make.
Nobody writes VS project files, you generate them, just the same as
makefiles... nobody writes makefiles.


On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 6:45 PM Petar via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 00:03:02 UTC, Manu wrote:
> >
> > Not really. VisualD is objectively the most functional and
> > competent
> > IDE/Debugger solution, BY FAR.
> > It's not an opinion, it's a measurable fact.
> >
> > Obviously, if you are into vim/emacs/whatever, then you don't
> > actually
> > really care much about IDE support and debugging, and in that
> > case, this
> > question is not relevant to you.
> > I agree that Code-D + VSCode is probably the second best
> > solution, but
> > there's really no comparison; the debugger is a kind of
> > funny/sad joke, the
> > D debug experience is poorly integrated, and the
> > intellisense/autocomplete
> > is nowhere near the same standard. There's no competition.
> >
> > Code-D is great work, but it's still catching up, and it may never do so because VSCode just has an embarrassingly bad debugger :(
>
> Professionally, I've used Visual Studio for the first 3-4 years of my career. Back then the company I worked for was a MSFT partner, so we all had the Professional or Ultimate edition that had all the bells and whistles. I agree that VS has probably the best debugger, though I'd actually say that the debugging experience is much better with C# than C++. Debugging C++ (with /Od and with or without /Zo) feels wanky compared C# which has always been rock-solid.
>
> However, I've since moved to Linux and I couldn't be happier. I
> haven't had to fire up Windows for the past 1-2 years. On my work
> machine, I neither have a dual boot, nor even a Windows VM, just
> Linux. Windows really sucks as a dev environment. And I'm telling
> this as someone who would for years be one of the first among my
> colleagues and friends to install the latest Windows, VS, MSVC,
> .NET FX /.NET Core preview builds, Chocolatey, vcpkg, WSL,
> Windows Terminal, Cygwin, Msys, Msys2 and so on.
> The only salvation I see is WSL2, but still, it's overall a
> pretty bad dev UX. No matter how much effort is put in a GUI IDE,
> nothing beets Unix as an IDE and especially modern distros, such
> as NixOS (my daily driver). Yes, it takes much more effort for
> beginners than VS, but it's all worth it.
>
> Coming back to VS Code, for what I do on my daily job it's really
> destroying the "real" VS:
> * It's cross-platform, so I can take my dev environment on
> whichever OS I work.
> * You don't need to create a "project file" to effectively work
> on a project
> * On Windows, admin user is not necessary to install & update.
> This makes the update process unnoticeable, where VS, before
> their new modular installer was unbearably slow (1h min).
> * Start time is much better. Additionally, in many cases, you
> don't need to restart when you install/uninstall an extension -
> this make's it much easier to test extensions for 1-2 mins and
> then throw them away.
> * The extensions integrate much better - in many cases it takes <
> 10 secs to install something, while with VS it takes at least
> 1min in my experience, sometimes even several minutes, depending
> on the size of the extension.
> * VS Code integrates much better with the system - on Windows you
> just right-click to open a folder or file and it's opened in less
> then 1-3secs. In the terminal you just type `code <path>` and
> it's done. I know this works already with full VS and I have used
> it, but its much slower startup time defeats this workflow.
> * For beginners (which don't know vim), VS Code is actually not a
> bad choice as the default git editor (it's just `git config
> --global core.editor "code --wait"`) (e.g. for interactive
> rebase, writing commit messages, git add -p edit, and so on)
> * Given that I spend at least at 30-70% of my time in the
> terminal, VS Code's integrated terminal is much better than
> whatever VS has had when I tried it over the years. I'd like the
> perf to be better with vim and git diff, but it's very workable.
> * vscodevim still has much to be desired, but it's miles ahead
> then the alternative extensions for the full VS
> * The editor as a whole is much *easier* to customize and I feel
> that in the past 1-2 years it has started to be *more*
> customizable compared to VS
> * Extensions like Remote development for containers and SSH are
> live savers. I couldn't live without them (if I have to use a GUI
> editor / IDE).
> * The overall language support is much better. VS does a couple
> of languages really well, but VSCode has a much richer extensions
> gallery and supports many more languages.
> * Of course, I'm biased, since I haven't had to use a debugger in
> the past several months, but these days I'd always pick an editor
> with a much better extensibility story because many of the things
> I need daily I haven't found alternatives for in VS.
>
> ----
>
> Rainer, the work you have done with VisualD is astounding! I have always been extremely impressed by the progress you have been making over the years!
>
> (Of course, not a high priority by any means, but) it would be
> great to have VisualD's engine for VS Code! I know that a large
> part of VisualD is very tightly coupled with VS, but I think that
> anything that could be made a bit more independent and reusable
> would be a plus.
> What I really wish is we had a single shared codebase for dlang
> editor support, that could be shared among editor extension
> writers, instead of having many community members working on
> competing solutions.
>

On 09/07/2020 10:22 PM, Manu wrote:
> Then the general autocomplete engine, which is fairly dependent on the detail expressed in the project files.

DCD is due for a rewrite into using dmd-fe.

However as it stands, I do not believe it is mature enough to use as a library for this purpose. So I commend Rainer for helping to mature it!

It'll help in the long run to get IDE's up to VisualD's experience for everything but debugging.

On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 08:40:24 UTC, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 00:03:02 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>> Not really. VisualD is objectively the most functional and competent
>> IDE/Debugger solution, BY FAR.
>> It's not an opinion, it's a measurable fact.

> Windows really sucks as a dev environment.

Probably Manu and I are arguing from OPPOSITE sides.

Linux as a dev env in itself contributes to 60-70% of the better-ness over Windows env for development. Its makes sense he holds such opinion since he's on windows...having to rely on Visual Studio for everything. Visual Studio as an IDE is pretty solid though...just not for everyone.

Nevertheless VS Code is pretty good for development. Its not an IDE BTW. And even then its quite interesting people think of it as such. D integration is not perfect, but its what most of us use. I know a lot of people in the community use it. I might as well say its the most used Code editor on earth.

Nevertheless, VisualD is high quality (not comparing here)...it makes sense considering the amount of work and yrs put into it.

On Thursday, 9 July 2020 at 08:40:24 UTC, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:

> What I really wish is we had a single shared codebase for dlang editor support, that could be shared among editor extension writers, instead of having many community members working on competing solutions.

That would be really nice. Doesn't Visual Studio (not VSCode) supports LSP these days?

--
/Jacob Carlborg

The tooling needs detailed build configuration knowledge, which is
relatively available to extract from the msbuild runtime. Makefiles are not
any sort of fun to extract such knowledge from, and I'm not aware of
standard tooling to hook into here.
dub should be simple, but that only works for simple D projects and small
libraries, it all falls over at scale. Even DMD itself is too large a D
project for Code-D to work well with.
There's also no sense of 'active configuration', which makes it impossible
to apply the proper build configuration when navigating or highlighting
code.

For example; VisualD not only *works*, but it can even do goto-definition
between languages; if you extern(C++) some function, and then "go to
definition" from your D code, it'll find it in the C++ code and navigate
there because of the centralised code database engine.
Code-D often can't even go to the definition of D functions in D code
reliably ;)

There is so much more work in VisualD than people can easily see at first glance.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:55 PM rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d-announce < digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 09/07/2020 10:22 PM, Manu wrote:
> > Then the general autocomplete engine, which is fairly dependent on the detail expressed in the project files.
>
> DCD is due for a rewrite into using dmd-fe.
>
> However as it stands, I do not believe it is mature enough to use as a library for this purpose. So I commend Rainer for helping to mature it!
>
> It'll help in the long run to get IDE's up to VisualD's experience for everything but debugging.
>