Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:19:56 -0700, Walter Bright thusly wrote: > In my discussions with companies about adopting D, the major barrier > that comes up over and over isn't Tango vs Phobos, dmd being GPL, > debugger support, libraries, bugs, etc., although those are important. > > It's the IDE. > > They say that the productivity gains of D's improvements are > overbalanced by the loss of productivity by moving away from an IDE. And > what is it about an IDE that is so productive? Intellisense (Microsoft's > word for autocompletion). > > So, while I'm not going to be writing an IDE, I figure that dmd can > help. dmd already puts out .doc and .di files. How about putting out an > xml file giving all the information needed for an IDE to implement > autocompletion? There'd be one .xml file generated per .d source file. > > The nice thing about an xml file is while D is relatively easy to parse, > xml is trivial. Furthermore, an xml format would be fairly robust in the > face of changes to D syntax. > > What do you think?
Well since there is already a project working on an Eclipse plugin, I see little use for other IDEs at the moment. The D community is rather small and only a small amount of people are capable of developing and willing to donate their free time on free IDE development (commercial IDEs have small potential now that Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ/KDevelop/Visual Studio dominate the market). So why not concentrate on fixing the spec and fixing compiler bugs instead of building a modest IDE support no one will use?
