On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 17:15:03 UTC, Laurent Tréguier
wrote:
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
The complaints I have is exactly why I'm myself maintaining
plugins for VSCode, Atom, and others soon. Don't worry, I still
think D is worth putting some time and effort into and I know
actions generally get more things done than words.
I also know that tons of stuff is yet to be done in regards to
the actual compilers and such.
It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this
department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet
another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but
already have what looks like very good tooling.
Then again they do have major industry players backing them
though...
Why is Go's IDE support baffling? It was a necessity to achieve
Google's commercial aims, I should think.
"
The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not
researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of
school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably
learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant
language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the
language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand
and easy to adopt."
– Rob Pike
I don't know the story of Rust, but if I were working on a
project as large as Firefox I guess I would want an IDE too!
Whereas it doesn't seem like it's so important to some of D's
commercial users because they have a different context.
I don't think it's overall baffling that D hasn't got the best
IDE support of emerging languages. The people that contribute to
it, as Jonathan says, seen to be leas interested in IDEs and no
company has found it important enough to pay someone else to work
on it. So far anyway but as adoption grows maybe that will
change.
