On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 at 18:45, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > > 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.
It's been a key hurdle for as long as I've been around here. I've been saying for 10 years that no company I've ever worked at can take D seriously without industry standard IDE support. My feeling is that we have recently reached MVP status... that's a huge step, 10 years in the making ;) I think it's now at a point where more people *wouldn't* reject it on contact than those who would. But we need to go much further to make developers genuinely comfortable, and thereby go out of their way to prefer using D than C++ and pitch as such to their managers. Among all developers I've demo-ed or introduced recently, I can say for certain that developer enthusiasm is driven by their perception of the tooling in the order of 10x more than the language.
