I've recently started evaluating D, and I thought as a D newbie
(but 20 year game dev veteran) I should share the things I felt
were missing or unclear, so you can decide if you want to do
something to cater new users. So my first notes are
1. Reading about D online: There is a decent amount of
information seems old, and it's hard to tell for newbies that D1
and D2 are different. Andrei's book seems like it is still the
best reference for the actual language, but since it is 7 years
old, as a newbie I expected it to be out of date. Maybe a 2nd
edition?
2. Set up the dev environment: While the language is solid, and
the base DMD install and "hello world" are easy to get going,
getting a full IDE configured is a lot more work. I would really
like a comprehensive guide to go from there to having a full
environment set up in for example VS Code. I've spent weeks
trying to get VS Code configured, and still haven't gotten
debugging to work. An idiot-proof step by step guide would be
nice, maybe like this "step 1 install VS Code from this link, DMD
from this link, Dub from this link, step 2 install these 5
extensions in VS Code, step 3 make these manual changes to the
configuration, step 4 download this sample project and open it,
step 5 here are the 5 important commands you need to build and
run". If there was a 15-minute guide, it would be much easier to
get to the parts that matter.
3. Setting up the dev env,take 2: Visual-D seems a lot easier to
configure, and it had functional samples. However, it was strange
that it doesn't use dub files directly and instead needs them
converted to visual studio build projects. I would prefer if it
the msbuild projects would just directly call Dub, as Dub seems
like the gold standard. My first attempt at generating a solution
from a dub project failed, so it feels maybe a bit unfinished. It
would also be great if Visual-D had a few more detailed templates
built in, maybe a Derelict SDL window, for example.
4. it took a while to see that the DMD builds come with x86
windows libraries, but no x64 windows libraries. That seems
strange in this day and age
I'm still very new on the actual language, but thought it better
that I share this while it is still fresh.
- My first experience as a D Newbie Peter R via Digitalmars-d
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