My first experience as a D Newbie

I've recently started evaluating D, and I thought as a D newbie (but 20 year game dev veteran) I should share the things I felt were missing or unclear, so you can decide if you want to do something to cater new users. So my first notes are

1. Reading about D online: There is a decent amount of information seems old, and it's hard to tell for newbies that D1 and D2 are different. Andrei's book seems like it is still the best reference for the actual language, but since it is 7 years old, as a newbie I expected it to be out of date. Maybe a 2nd edition?
2. Set up the dev environment: While the language is solid, and the base DMD install and "hello world" are easy to get going, getting a full IDE configured is a lot more work. I would really like a comprehensive guide to go from there to having a full environment set up in for example VS Code. I've spent weeks trying to get VS Code configured, and still haven't gotten debugging to work. An idiot-proof step by step guide would be nice, maybe like this "step 1 install VS Code from this link, DMD from this link, Dub from this link, step 2 install these 5 extensions in VS Code, step 3 make these manual changes to the configuration, step 4 download this sample project and open it, step 5 here are the 5 important commands you need to build and run". If there was a 15-minute guide, it would be much easier to get to the parts that matter.
3. Setting up the dev env,take 2: Visual-D seems a lot easier to configure, and it had functional samples. However, it was strange that it doesn't use dub files directly and instead needs them converted to visual studio build projects. I would prefer if it the msbuild projects would just directly call Dub, as Dub seems like the gold standard. My first attempt at generating a solution from a dub project failed, so it feels maybe a bit unfinished. It would also be great if Visual-D had a few more detailed templates built in, maybe a Derelict SDL window, for example.
4. it took a while to see that the DMD builds come with x86 windows libraries, but no x64 windows libraries. That seems strange in this day and age

I'm still very new on the actual language, but thought it better that I share this while it is still fresh.

On 11/10/2017 8:23 AM, Peter R wrote: snip > 4. it took a while to see that the DMD builds come with x86 windows libraries, but no x64 windows libraries. That seems strange in this day and age We should document this on the download page making it obvious why you also need VS.

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 07:23:02 UTC, Peter R wrote: > [snip] I've spent weeks trying to get VS Code configured, and still haven't gotten debugging to work. An idiot-proof step by step guide would be nice, maybe like this "step 1 install VS Code from this link, DMD from this link, Dub from this link, step 2 install these 5 extensions in VS Code, step 3 make these manual changes to the configuration, step 4 download this sample project and open it, step 5 here are the 5 important commands you need to build and run". If there was a 15-minute guide, it would be much easier to get to the parts that matter. I don't use VS Code, but this is probably worth doing. I don't think I've ever set up debugging on Windows for D. I just put in writeln statements to try and figure out what's going on.

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 11:57:18 UTC, jmh530 wrote: > I just put in writeln statements to try and figure out what's going on. It depends on what programs you are doing. There are a huge number of cases when this way takes lot more time/efforts than using debugger.

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 14:25:34 UTC, Dmitry wrote: > It depends on what programs you are doing. There are a huge number of cases when this way takes lot more time/efforts than using debugger. Haha, yeah I know...

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 07:23:02 UTC, Peter R wrote: > [...] +10 We need a walkthru of how to set up everything. It's like a new cook being give all the ingredients but no recipe instructions.

On 10/11/17 1:42 PM, WhatMeWorry wrote: > On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 07:23:02 UTC, Peter R wrote: >> [...] > > +10 We need a walkthru of how to set up everything. It's like a new cook being give all the ingredients but no recipe instructions. I have to say as someone who uses mostly non-windows systems, these problems only seem to crop up for Windows developers. I don't know if it's a different expectation or a different mindset or something else. -Steve

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 17:55:18 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: > > I have to say as someone who uses mostly non-windows systems, these problems only seem to crop up for Windows developers. > > I don't know if it's a different expectation or a different mindset or something else. Its probably more the fact that most of the developers use Unix based system for development, be it OSx or Linux. As a result Windows is the overlooked system what results in a lack of testing. You really do not want to know the amount of times issues showed up because editor plugins crashes or did not work on windows properly. Very frustrating when its your first experience with a language. It also helps that for instance has a more unified package manager so for people it can simply be apt-get install a few packages and that is it. The patting and other issues are most of the time properly resolved. And it does not help when most plugins are developed by one developer, that is on the above mentioned Unix based systems.

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