I have been asked by my boss to put together a overview of the state of D with regards to using it in a medium sized commercial app. It will be a development tool that we expect to be, complexity wise, somewhat akin to AWK, the C preprocessor or pearl. Several of the questions I have been asked to address were easy for me to answer but a few are outside my experience. So I’m looking for answers to some of these questions.


I’ll post their questions (with a few edits) and, where appropriate, the specific points I’m looking for input on.

1. “ddbg works great with dmd 2.012.  However, when used with dmd 1.x, the local values do not print well. Please find out if there are plans to support dmd 1.x in ddbg.”


2. “Please determine how Code::Blocks works as a debugger when combined with ddbg for dmd 1.x.”
-a. Is D support under code::blocks under active development?
-b. If we were to use it and then found D specific issues are we likely to see the fixed in a reasonably short time frame?


3. “Can Code::Blocks do auto-complete in general and what would it take to make it work for D.”
-a. I should really answerer the first bit myself but I don’t have Code::Blocks (or C++) set up on my systems.


4. “What is the current stability of dmd 2.0?”
-a. I said alpha. Please correct me if I’m wrong.


5. “What is the estimated “ship date” of dmd 2.0?”


6. “What is the new features list for dmd 2.0? “



I generally develop with a good text editor and a build script so I’m not at all up to date on IDE’s and such so I have a few questions of my own:

1. What is the state of the art in IDE’s for D? Code::Blocks? Eclipse+Decent?

2. What stage are these in? Stable, approaching stability, active development, in development but not very active? 

3. Same for debuggers. I know ddbg works on windows and for Linux there is a GDB patch and ZeroBugs. However I haven’t seen much recent work on any of these. 

4. Direct question to Walter (and the developers of the other tools) If we were to use D and run into a blocking issue, can we effect your properties with regards to resolving it? (This assumes that the issue is not a language design issue.)


If I get enough responses that I can put together a report of some kind for my boss I’ll post it somewhere (with necessary redactions ;-)

BCS:
> 4. “What is the current stability of dmd 2.0?”
> -a. I said alpha. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
> 5. “What is the estimated “ship date” of dmd 2.0?”

If it's a "real project" I suggest you to use 1.x, that's not alpha.

Bye,
bearophile

> BCS:
> 
>> 4. “What is the current stability of dmd 2.0?” -a. I said alpha.
>> Please correct me if I’m wrong. 5. “What is the estimated “ship
>> date” of dmd 2.0?”
>> 

Garsh De'rn Unicode!!! (I wrote that in word :b)

BCS wrote:

> 4. Direct question to Walter (and the developers of the other tools) If we were to use D and run into a blocking issue, can we effect your properties with regards to resolving it? (This assumes that the issue is not a language design issue.)

You mean "can we affect your priorities"?
Are you thinking cash here?

--bb

Reply to Bill,

> BCS wrote:
> 
>> 4. Direct question to Walter (and the developers of the other tools)
>> If we were to use D and run into a blocking issue, can we effect your
>> properties with regards to resolving it? (This assumes that the issue
>> is not a language design issue.)
>> 
> You mean "can we affect your priorities"?

http://xkcd.com/326/

> Are you thinking cash here?

Um, that /might/ be on the list... way at the end... in really small amounts... a long way after thank you notes, begging, promises of citations in the appreciation notes and appealing to your vanity, duty and anything else we can including an offer of lunch "if you ever happen to be in this neck of the woods".

Now I'm not talking bribes here or anything. More like: "this is a bug, everyone says it's a bug, could we please get a fix to it soon?"

BCS Wrote:
> 1. What is the state of the art in IDE’s for D? Code::Blocks? Eclipse+Decent?
> 
> 2. What stage are these in? Stable, approaching stability, active development, in development but not very active?

I can only answer with regards to Descent. As of Descent 0.5.1, it should be considered "stable" as in it will not hang or crash, but "alpha" in terms of functionality. Any functionality that requires semantic resolution (in particular, auto-complete and go-to-definition) may not work properly for all input (but should work fine for most :-)!). Semantic errors should be turned off for large projects, as there are significant problems with these. However, even if certain features do not work all the time, Eclipse will not crash, and the text editing capabilities and syntax error marking will always remain usable.

The supported features in Descent can be seen here: http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent

It was designed from the ground-up for D support, so supports many more D-specific features than Code::Blocks does, and properly handles templates (to some degree). On the other hand it's written in Java, based on Eclipse and may be too "bloated" for people used to text editors or even Code::Blocks (it takes about 150MB worth of downloads to get it all up and running if you include the Java runtime).

Ary can probably answer further, especially on his plans for Descent's future. I'm hoping to have project building and unit testing support integrated in Descent by the next release, but it may be pushed back further.

Reply to Robert,

> BCS Wrote:
> 
>> 1. What is the state of the art in IDE's for D? Code::Blocks?
>> Eclipse+Decent?
>> 
>> 2. What stage are these in? Stable, approaching stability, active
>> development, in development but not very active?
>> 
>
> I can only answer with regards to Descent.[...]

thanks. Good stuff.

I should also add that many of Descent's semantic features are 1.x-only.

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:23:09 +0000, BCS wrote:


> 4. “What is the current stability of dmd 2.0?” -a. I said alpha. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I think alpha is pretty much correct.

> 5. “What is the estimated “ship date” of dmd 2.0?”
I think to remember Walter mentioned autumn in some post on the NG. But I can't find the post in question to verify that statement.

> 
> 3. Same for debuggers. I know ddbg works on windows and for Linux there is a GDB patch and ZeroBugs. However I haven’t seen much recent work on any of these.
> 

I tried ZeroBugs without much debugger knowledge;
but I have impression that it works quite nice.
It showed the source code along with the error line along with the thread
trace (for the correct thread, afaik).

How does poseidon match up to Descent?
I never used Descent nor Code::Blocks, but maybe I just don't know what I'm
missing.

>I should also add that many of Descent's semantic features are 1.x-only.