On Saturday, 27 January 2018 at 18:18:02 UTC, Dgame wrote: One of our programmers use
VIM too, but on a regular basis he has problems like finding/renaming files/variables or optimize imports or code formatting. I bet you can do that with the right tools and a lot of time as good as an IDE can do it, but the IDE can do that out of the box without consuming your time. It's like I said - if you mainly used VIM/Emacs you think everything is fine and would not try an IDE - but that's not what nowadays happens to new programmers. And to make D appealing to them, D has to offer good IDE support or it will remain as a hobby language with very few exceptions.
I think it depends on what we consider good IDE support. We can use C++ as baseline, so syntax highlighting, code completion and debugging. Or we can take it a level higher, and go into Java/C# territory, with stuff like automatic variable renaming across the entire project, extracting fields into class etc.
While I think D IDEs, when they work, aren't that much behind C++ IDEs (never really tried debugging D though), but they don't really have a chance with Java/C# IDEs and probably never will. Given how dynamic D can be with CTFE/mixins, you can't do the kind of safe refactoring that those IDEs allow. The same applies to C++, Rust, and probably Go as well.
