On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 23:57:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 at 06:26, monkyyy via Digitalmars-d < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 16:25:37 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> >
>> > I've spent 15+ years trying to see D move beyond a hobby/curiosity/toy, but this stuff shows we're not in good shape even after such a long time :/
>>
>> Have you been a d-doomer long or is this new?
>
>
> "Doom"? I mean, you need to be realistic, and honest.

Im counting myself among the doomer crowd.

> They're not zealots;
> important debug features

Im for the "printf debugger" team, not the big ide team. But ive also have some experiments in debugging(wasm+raylib, truly was awful not having basic strings handling once it got even slightly), so I made an in-"engine" debugger; hacky and used a compiler bug but it helped.

Im also looking into making a better writeln for opend.

Maybe I could point you at some options if your compromising on ide vs printf debate?

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 16:25:37 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024, 01:51 Meta via Digitalmars-d, < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:07:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> What specific problems are you hitting? I don't write much D anymore (or do really *any* hobby programming, really), but I did recently dust off one of my old projects and get it compiling again with the latest dmd. I'm on Windows 11 and using Visual Studio with Visual D, and besides it not recognizing some stuff like the shortened method syntax, I haven't really noticed any issues.
>>
>
> Syntax highlighting takes 10s of seconds, sometimes minutes, and may never
> complete.
> Go-to definition for most symbols don't work.
> Press '.' after an aggregate or an enum or whatever, the list that pops up
> rarely if ever shows any appropriate members or completion suggestions.
> Ctrl-space (complete what I'm typing) doesn't work anymore.

That's very weird. I'm using a recent version of Visual D from a few months ago, and I'm not seeing *any* of the problems you've mentioned. Granted I haven't needed to use the debugger in awhile, but syntax highlighting, go to definition, the symbol list and autocompletion... They all work. Is it possible the problem is due to some Visual D/Visual Studio settings? Like I have the setting checked to generate the full map file for me project, plus the JSON file that Visual D uses for a lot of stuff. Other than that, I dunno.

To be honest though, were I to start a new project for a startup, I would go with Java without question. D is fine for hobby programming and smaller scale stuff, but modern Java is Good Enough™️ - they're even getting pattern matching now with enhanced switch statements. I honestly don't know why anyone uses anything other than Java for serious projects, unless you have hard real time requirements or are working with microcontrollers (which you are, IIRC, so). The one downside is that there are *so* many shitty Java programmers (many whom I have worked with), that picking a more niche language automatically weeds out.

On Wednesday, 16 October 2024 at 21:14:29 UTC, Meta wrote:
> The one downside is that there are *so* many shitty Java programmers (many whom I have worked with), that picking a more niche language automatically weeds out.

Clojure or Scala fixes that.

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 16:25:37 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024, 01:51 Meta via Digitalmars-d, < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:07:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
..
>
> Syntax highlighting takes 10s of seconds, sometimes minutes, and may never
> complete.
> Go-to definition for most symbols don't work.
> Press '.' after an aggregate or an enum or whatever, the list that pops up
> rarely if ever shows any appropriate members or completion suggestions.
> Ctrl-space (complete what I'm typing) doesn't work anymore.
>
> I think it's all related to the new DMD-based semantic analysis bailing out in various situations that I don't understand.
>
> The debugger has significant problems to; important debug features that do essential stuff like show the string for a custom string type have been locking up under unpredictable circumstances.
>

In my experience VisualD often have issues with the latest (or even previous version) of VS. I think it was a constant issue for Rainer to accommodate the breaking changes from each new version of VS. Which version of VS are you using?

Personally I will not even bother to try it with VS 2022.

But I imagine that, since you are targeting micro-controllers, you probably don't need the latest and greatest VS - if you can tolerate it you can try with VS 2017 (or even 2015) - I still have a few issues but most of the stuff you report actually worked for me on VS 2015. I've changed some time ago to VS 2017, but since then didn't have the time to use VisualD extensively ... but at least the basics seem to work.

On Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 09:42:47 UTC, Manu wrote:
>
> 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.

I use VisualD a lot and I had sadly to disable semantic analysis.
You do loose completion, but still keep syntax, debugging, and search.
So it did become worse but what can we do to encourage things to become better?
DParser crashes are quite hard and time-consuming to isolate.