On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> As written in the description I'm really new to D, I discovered it a few weeks ago thanks to the D Conf in Berlin.
>
> After playing around for couple of days with it, I wanted to share my journey with you guys on several points.
>
>
>
> 1 - Installation (DMD and DUB)
>
> I'm running Fedora 23 on a daily basis and the installation was OK. Not as easy as on mac but still.
> I can't say that that it was easy, because I had to curl dub.rpm package and compile it from source. But it doesn't matter because for a linux user thoses things a pretty usual.
>
>
> 2 - Play-around
>
> That is the good part, after setting up my evt creating a Hello World project and something a bit more complicated was really easy.
> Thank's to DUB which take care of everything for me I was able to create a website using Vibe.d project.
> Congratulations on this point to all the people who made dub. Programming in 2016 should be like this.
>
> The only bad point I can see here is that it looks like it's more easy easy to get ready on a mac than on a linux machine.
> (I tried all this with a friend who is running the latest version of mac).
>
>
>
> 3 - Library
>
> That part was also good. Clicking on the packages menu on the website and searching for the things I need was indeed super easy. Everything in a big registery that's cool.
> I have a to say that I'm fucking amazed by the dlang.org website which is super fast (WOW).
>
> 4 - Documentation (For a newbie)
>
> This part was a bit different. By being a total newbie to the D language I don't really know where to begins.
> Of course I went to the getstarted.html page but as a newbie with no system programming background I feel there are too many choices for me.
> IMHO the best solution here would some kind of step by step tutorial that go through all thoses points with very basic explanation.
> After trying every of thoses pages, I finally try the "D Web Development Kai Nacke" book which is pretty interesting.
>
> The only bad point here is that I can't find a "Effective D" page. A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic D code. A must read for any new D programmer. It augments the tour and the language specification, both of which should be read first. (Like in golang for example)
>
> 5 - Tools
>
> Well in one word. It sucks. I've tried to setup an editor with all the features that we can see in the wiki matrix.
> The only one which take them all is vscode. But for setup the plugin I had to compile the workspace-d package (which at the end didn't worked https://github.com/Pure-D/workspace-d/issues/16#issuecomment-221274965).
> So I folded over Sublime Text to have autocompletion but it's only available for the standard library (and not for Vibe.d, the things that i'm looking to use).
>
> However I had to say that I was amazed by the rapidity of speed answer over my github issue, WebFreak001 is doing really great job here!!
>
>
> So, my plan here is to get more knowledge about the dlang in near future. I'll be active on forum to annoy you guys.
>
> Ps : I'm looking for up to date benchmark such as Dlang vs Go vs Nodejs vs Swift vs TurboPascal ;) (Actually without pascal).
>
> Cheers

Thanks for the detailed experience report!

Just one question about the installation - have you tried the install.sh script on http://dlang.org/download? I really like it because it is simple, allows you to manage several versions of the language and even provides easy access to the nightly builds.

About the benchmarks - you should know that any benchmark actually measures the speed of the generated code by a particular implementation of the language and also particular library functions, so you can't objectively compare languages that way, because all languages allow you to solve the same problem in different ways and also becuase different compilers can generate different code from the same D source file.
Of the languages you have listed, D gives you the most unrestricted access to the hardware, which would allow you to squeeze every bit of performance. However, unlike other systems programming languages, it allows you to write your code almost as easily as with scripting languages, which allows you to get a working prototype quickly and later (if you so desire) you can optimize it.
My general advice is to use DMD for its quick edit-compile-debug cycle, and then use LDC or GDC for measuring perfomance. Currently I would recommend LDC as it is more up-to-date with DMD at the moment, than GDC.

On Wed, 2016-05-25 at 07:43 +0000, llaine via Digitalmars-d-learn
wrote:
[…]
> 
> Thank your for your answer! Maybe all thoses are Fedora related yes :) But I guess that for the moment I have to keep it unfortunatly but that's OK, let's try to make dlang great on fedora !

D is a problem on Fedora: dmd, gdc, and dub are not packaged. ldc is so there is that – many would argue that having ldc is much more important than dmd or gdc.  Yes there are dmd and dub rpms but it is all very manual. There needs to be a repository for Fedora rpms as there is one for Debian debs.

I do not really have the proper resources to host such a repository and because of this I have not built one. I know I should rather than just moan, but Debian is my main platform and that is covered.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 09:41:10 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-05-25 at 07:43 +0000, llaine via Digitalmars-d-learn
> wrote:
> […]
>> [...]
>
> D is a problem on Fedora: dmd, gdc, and dub are not packaged. ldc is so there is that – many would argue that having ldc is much more important than dmd or gdc.  Yes there are dmd and dub rpms but it is all very manual. There needs to be a repository for Fedora rpms as there is one for Debian debs.
>
> I do not really have the proper resources to host such a repository and because of this I have not built one. I know I should rather than just moan, but Debian is my main platform and that is covered.

So in your opinion Debian is the best platform for D development? Which IDE/Editor to you use?

On Wed, 2016-05-25 at 09:54 +0000, llaine via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> […]
> 
> So in your opinion Debian is the best platform for D development? Which IDE/Editor to you use?

Use of Debian is not really a D thing , but because of D-Apt Debian is good for D working. I am sure Arch is as well.

I mix between Emacs and IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse if necessary. D is fairly well supported in Emacs. There is DDT for Eclipse. For IntelliJ IDEA there is the beginnings of support from Kingsley. This needs more work and if it is aggreed that the plugin can move from being Java implemented to being Kotlin implemented, I may well wade in to it's development.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 09:41:10 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:

> D is a problem on Fedora: dmd, gdc, and dub are not packaged. ldc is so there is that – many would argue that having ldc is much more important than dmd or gdc.

The main problem is that ldc, dmd and gdc cannot share the same runtime library yet. So the three compilers do not cohabit well in a system wide environment. The manual installation puts each compiler in their own /opt/<compiler> or /usr/local/<compiler> directory with a lot of stuffs duplicated (gdc come with its own gcc compiler, etc.). I do not known how Debian or ArchLinux deal with that, but I guess Fedora maintainers judge this situation unsustainable. The choice of ldc is probably the best one, to gather both a recent druntime and a compiler producing fast executable.

>  Yes there are dmd and dub rpms but it is all very manual. There needs to be a repository for Fedora rpms as there is one for Debian debs.

Yes, that may be a good thing.
Another one would be to detach the development of phobos from dmd, and that the developer of phobos take care not to break the compatibility of the library with other compilers.

--
Richard

On Wed, 2016-05-25 at 10:18 +0000, Richard Delorme via Digitalmars-d-
learn wrote:
[…]
> The main problem is that ldc, dmd and gdc cannot share the same runtime library yet. So the three compilers do not cohabit well in a system wide environment. The manual installation puts each compiler in their own /opt/<compiler> or /usr/local/<compiler> directory with a lot of stuffs duplicated (gdc come with its own gcc compiler, etc.). I do not known how Debian or ArchLinux deal with that, but I guess Fedora maintainers judge this situation unsustainable. The choice of ldc is probably the best one, to gather both a recent druntime and a compiler producing fast executable.

Sadly, on Debian, the gdc packaging and the ldc packaging conflict over the search path for module sources and so gdc will not work if ldc is installed.

This turns out to be a real ####### pain for the SCons tests.

The problem for Fedora is that there are no maintainers taking responsibility for D stuff other than ldc. Like Debian and Arch, Fedora relies on people volunteering and keeping going with packaging. ldc is packaged by all, which is good. Sadly no dub.

[…]
> Yes, that may be a good thing.
> Another one would be to detach the development of phobos from
> dmd, and that the developer of phobos take care not to break the
> compatibility of the library with other compilers.

I thought DMD and Phobos were separate. Given proper versioning (which I think we have) there should be no problem.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:
>
> The only bad point here is that I can't find a "Effective D" page. A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic D code. A must read for any new D programmer. It augments the tour and the language specification, both of which should be read first. (Like in golang for example)

I gather tips and tricks here https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/ with a bias towards the surprising stuff. I would say there is few actual idioms in there.

For more quality and comprehensiveness I strongly recommend to get D books.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 09:41:10 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> I do not really have the proper resources to host such a repository and because of this I have not built one. I know I should rather than just moan, but Debian is my main platform and that is covered.

Yes, this is the core problem. There is no single person, which (a) cares enough about Fedora and (b) can fix it. Unless this champion appears, Fedora will continue to suck for newbies.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 11:24:44 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> […]
>> [...]
>
> I thought DMD and Phobos were separate. Given proper versioning (which I think we have) there should be no problem.

The problem are parts like std.math which contain compiler-specific optimizations. That being said I do think that it's on the roadmap to automatically test the newest Phobos with ldc / gdc - that would already be a good step :)

On Wed, 2016-05-25 at 13:57 +0000, qznc via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 May 2016 at 09:41:10 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > I do not really have the proper resources to host such a repository and because of this I have not built one. I know I should rather than just moan, but Debian is my main platform and that is covered.
> 
> Yes, this is the core problem. There is no single person, which
> (a) cares enough about Fedora and (b) can fix it. Unless this
> champion appears, Fedora will continue to suck for newbies.

Are there enough people around such that we can make a start at something that is not separate as d-apt is from Debian, but is an integral stepping stone to the Fedora repository. It may be that doing a Fedora equivalent of d-apt is a first step. Given the relatively low traffic initially, I can host a repository at some URL such as fedora.dlang.org or some such, we can experiment with fedora.winder.org.uk maybe.

The issue is setting up a Git build framework that does all the RPM builds automatically. This is the successful basis for Debian, Fedora and I suspect d-apt.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder