On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks
contributing think is the most important - frequently what is
most important for them for what they do, and very few (if any)
of the major contributors use or care about IDEs for their own
use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do with IDEs.
There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which
is why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they
work reasonably well, but the only two ways that they're going
to get more work done on them than is currently happening is if
the folks who care about that sort of thing contribute or if
they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long ago, the D
Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to
pay someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:
https://forum.dlang.org/post/rmqvglgccmgoajmhy...@forum.dlang.org
So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate
or pitch in.
The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has
improved greatly over time even if it may not be where you want
it to be. But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top
priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be
sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about
because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort
of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and
selfish as it may be, when we spend the time to contribute to
D, we're generally going to work on the stuff that we see as
having the most value for getting done what we care about. And
there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every D
user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.
- Jonathan M Davis
Dear Jonathan, you've just said it. There is no real plan and
only problems that someone deems interesting or challenging at a
given moment are tackled. If they solve a problem for a lot of
users, it's only a side effect. The advent of a D Foundation
hasn't changed anything in this regard, and it seems not to be
just a financial issue. It's the mentality. In other words, D is
still unreliable, and if that what the community wants, fine, but
instead of promoting it as a substitute for C/C++, Java etc. it
should come with a warning label that says "D is in many parts
still at an experimental stage and ships with no guarantees
whatsoever. Use at your own risk." That would save both the
language developers and (potential) users a lot of headaches.
I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot of
friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case: thought)
that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a language
they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership prefers to
keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see what works
and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where the user can
test other people's ideas with every new release.
