On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:03:28 -0800, Mike Parker <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 04:29:22 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
I don't know if I can express how strongly I disagree with that
sentiment. I don't use dub, I don't really want to use dub, and I am
virtually certain that the whole concept of using dub is a going to
make newbie acceptance much more difficult. D is supposed to make life
easier, not harder.
DUB is great if you're an experienced linux dev. But for somebody just
getting started, especially those coming from other languages with
standard libraries (aka, all of them) the idea of having to use a
package manager to do anything is completely backwards. We need to be
reducing our project setup times, not increasing them by making people
download the same 10 packages for every project they start. People want
to download a language and start writing code. Not faff about with
getting the right package configuration just to write some output to
the console.
You're greatly underestimating just how easy dub makes developing with
D. I'm by no means a Linux dev. My life has been lived on Windows. But I
use dub exclusively now and would love to see it packaged with DMD and
become the de facto way to get D libraries. If Phobos were to be broken
into a set of dub packages, even better.
Setting up a package.json for a new project is extremely easy. Once it's
done you can copy it around for future projects with minor changes.
Compilation, in its simplest form, then becomes:
dub build
And all the libraries you need are automatically pulled down. Then they
are available for any other projects that need them. It doesn't get any
easier than that.
Plus, once all of the D IDEs get support for it worked out, you then
have one universal project configuration tool. No more need to provide
build scripts, make files, Visual Studio solutions, MonoD projects, or
whatever else. No matter your choice of text editor/IDE, one
configuration file rules them all.
Ultimately, this would make it much, much easier to get started with D.
So far, my experience in using dub with Derelict has suggested this to
be true. I still get people asking for help with using Derelict 3
without dub, often because they don't know how to configure the import
path or the linker in their IDE, or don't understand what it even means
(and, apparently, have failed to read any documentation on the subject).
I've gotten *zero* compile/link issues about building with dub. Maybe
that just means the newbies aren't using dub, or that they aren't
reporting their problems to me, but I suspect it's because dub is easy.
Well, I can be wrong. I fully admit to not having any experience with it.
But that doesn't answer my other problem. :-)
--
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator
