On 18 October 2013 07:20, Rainer Schuetze <r.sagitario@gmx.de> wrote:

On 17.10.2013 10:41, Manu wrote:

Hmmm, I tend to think that sc.ini should be ignored/overridden entirely
under VisualD.
Visual Studio has all its own places to configure paths and options.

Anyone who runs more than one version of Visual Studio has to
micro-manage sc.ini, which is really annoying.
As a VisualD user, I expect to be able to access all settings and paths
in Visual Studio, and they should be relevant for the version of Visual
Studio in use.

At least that's my take on it, from an end-user perspective.

Makes sense, though I'm unsure how to stop dmd from interpreting sc.ini. Adding an empty sc.ini into the project folder could work, but is a bit ugly.

Perhaps ask Walter to add a command-line option which would ignore sc.ini and expect all options usually presented in sc.ini to be explicitly given on the command line?

Something to that effect I suppose. Not sure... :/

On a side note, Visual Studio tends to maintain it's default settings in
property sheets (you can access the x64 defaults under
Microsoft.Cpp.x64.user under the Property Manager). I wonder if VisualD
should also store defaults in the same place, but then I noticed that
VisualD project's don't seem to have any presence in the Property
Manager... I guess it's a special project type, and therefore subvert's
MSBuild? I don't really know how all that stuff fits together.

When I started work on Visual D, VS2008 was the current version and it did not use msbuild for C++ (IIRC only for C#). There was no good reason to build on top of msbuild.

Even with VS2010, I don't like msbuild. I think msbuild has good dependency handling, see the Intel Compiler integration which is horrible. My impression is that MS subverts msbuild for C++ to make it acceptable.

Fair enough.

So property sheet stuff is all part of MSBuild is it not? Or maybe that's wrong?

My point was that as an observation, MS seems to have moved a lot of the default compiler configuration into those property sheets which you can configure through the property manager.

I'm not sure if that's all MSBuild-specific, but it seems to be a fairly nice way to collect that sort of data, in nice little XML files and a convenient property grid type editor.

If that's the standard go-to location to configure the default compiler options, I wonder if VisualD should also try and use that? Rather than having lots of custom UI for VisualD global options.

I can imagine having a suite of property sheets for each compiler+architecture:

Where MS provides: Microsoft.Cpp.x64.user (and friends) for instance, VisualD might maintain a suite something like:

VisualD.Dmd.x86.user, VisualD.Dmd.x64.user, VisualD.Gdc.x86.user, VisualD.Gdc.x64.user, VisualD.Ldc.x86.user, VisualD.Ldc.x64.user... ??

The problem I see (and the reason I was thinking on it in the first place), is that the VisualD options under 'Options->Projects and Solutions->Visual D Settings->XXX Directories' don't seem to be rich enough to properly configure defaults for each compiler, and not for each architecture. In particular, under 'DMD Directories' there is 'Library Paths', but no separation for x86 and x64, which makes that box quite unusable. I'm also not sure what 'Executable paths' is for, but considering the 32bit tools are in dmd2/windows/bin and the 64bit tools are provided by MS, I'm not sure what to make of it.

This is obviously not stuff that needs urgent attention, but since we're on the topic of trying to tighten up the experience to make it intuitive and fool-proof, these are all details worth considering.

You know, thinking on it, it's kinda strange in a sense that D should
have completely distinct library paths at all. It might be useful in
VisualD to add all the C/C++ x64 library paths as standard link paths
aswell.
Surely it's reasonable as a Visual Studio end-user to assume that any
libs available to C/C++ should also be available to D too? These are
'system libs' after all. At least, they've been registered with VS as if
they are.

I tend to agree. I'll see if I can find the C++ settings somewhere, so I can add a switch to add the library paths automatically.

I think we'll need different global settings for Win32 and Win64, too.

>= VS2010 uses property sheets, which are separated by architecture to give the defaults.

But yeah, you're right, we already lack a distinction between the global configuration for x86/x64 in the main options, so it probably needs to be addressed one way or another.

I think a lot of this will be simplified if your COFF for x86 branch that I saw in your fork is every polished up ;)

It would be nice to just leave OMF behind and have full access to all system libraries in Windows for both architectures. The OMF/COFF separation (and consequent fragmentation of paths and tools) is the source of most of this complexity.

I'm not sure we should add too many special cases, everybody has his
own set of favorite libraries (I haven't touched DirectX for more
than 10 years). Considering that you probably have to make your own
imports for the respective declarations, I think it is ok to add an
appropriate library path to your project aswell.

It seems the DX-SDK does not end up in the LIB environment variable
for the VS command prompt aswell, though I see it added in the
Visual Studio settings.

I only suggest the DXSDK lib in particular for a few reasons:
1. It's a really standard Microsoft lib, not just some 3rd party thing.
2. Being a Microsoft lib, it integrates into Visual Studio
automatically when installed, and it's necessary to do basically any
multimedia in windows.
3. It's been integrated into the Windows 8 SDK from VS2012 and on
(that's why the stand-alone package is quite old), but for the sake of
'it just works', for prior versions of Visual Studio (which we do
support), the path needs to be added.

Ie, there's a risk of VS2012 users saying "well it works for me!", but
the VS2010 users complaining that it doesn't seem to work for them, and
then scratching heads why it works for some but not others.

With the option to include C++ libraries, the DX-SDK libraries will be found, too. At least from within Visual D...

Very true.