On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 09:49:34 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr maybe great for those who have to use C++, but for those with a choice it is the fastest route to Rust. And then you find Rust cannot cope nicely with many C libraries. Hence you find your way to D. Only to find to developer environments nowhere near as good.
Well, currently C++17 has overall better semantics than Rust and D, for system level programming.
It is just a very expensive language to become and remain proficient in, and C++ syntax issues means you have to spend more effort on making your code maintainable... :-/
Both Rust and D have syntax and semantic issues, if they had focused on improving the ergonomics instead of adding features then they could take on C++. As it stands, they cannot.
So yes, and top notch editor is needed to gain ground, but isn't sufficient as of today.
For a traditional Emacs person, I am finding CLion a joy to use. D needs equivalents.
Good static typing based editors matter _a lot_. My own experience is that PyCharm makes it harder to justify using a statically typed language over Python. So Python benefits enormously from PyCharm being available in a community edition.
It is quite interesting that editors can add missing language features like that and turn dynamic languages into gradually typed languages (more or less).
