On 8 December 2013 11:34, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

On 12/7/2013 4:46 PM, Manu wrote:

True as compared to C, but I wouldn't say this is true in general.
C# and Java make it easy to refactor code rapidly. D doesn't have any such tools
yet.
It's my #1 wishlist item for VisualD and Mono-D, and I await such tooling with
great anticipation.
Maybe when the D front-end is a library, and tooling has such powerful (and
reliable) semantic analysis as the compiler does it may be possible?

Needing a tool to refactor code is a bit of a mystery to me. I've never used one, and never felt that not having one inhibited me from refactoring.

Well I'd suspect that given time to use one for a significant portion of time, you will come to appreciate how much time it can save :)

At least in certain types of code, which perhaps you don't spend an awful lot of time writing?

I find 'client code' tends to be subject to a higher frequency of trivial changes and refactorings. This sort of code is less concise, more random; just stuff that does stuff or responds to events or whatever written around the place.

Systems code like compilers tend to be a lot more succinct, self contained and well structured which, supports simpler refactoring internally, but any such change may require a huge amount of client code to be re-jigged. It's nice to reliably automate this sort of thing.

Trust me, robust refactoring tools save a lot of time! :)