On 17/09/2013 02:30, Manu wrote:
On 17 September 2013 01:52, Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+...@gmail.com <mailto:brunodomedeiros+...@gmail.com>> wrote:On 13/09/2013 08:46, eles wrote: On Saturday, 7 September 2013 at 19:05:03 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: Recent threads here have made it pretty clear that VisualD is a critical piece of D infrastructure. (VisualD integrated D usage into Microsoft Visual Studio.) Allow me to support this idea, however to suggest that also add a cross-platform IDE/plug-in. This is important for the Linux world. Current choices are DDT, for Eclipse and Mono-D, for MonoDevelop. I would vote for the two for the time being and see how things develop. Official endorsement should increase their visibility, their use and, why not, patches. In the future, they could also be integrated in the installer. I would also suggest to move DDT on github (Mono-D is already there). All these, of course, only if respective authors agree. I kindly ask them to provide their POV. It's not clear to me what any of these measures would help with. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Manu's point with regards with IDE "official endorsement" was more to try to have the D language organization devs (Walter, Andrei, etc.) *use* VisualD or another IDE and understand the issues around it (especially with regards to compiler/debugger integration). Just having them make an "official endorsement" of an IDE, or putting it in the DLang github, but without actually using it much, that I'm not sure what it would achieve. The vast majority of other D users will just use the IDE of their choice regardless. The number of contributors to VisualD is likely to not change much either, I suspect. Well, currently the number of Visual-D contributors is exactly 1. I don't find it that impossible to see a 2x, maybe even 3x increase in contributors. I think the most important point though, is that the bugs are in the same tracker as all the rest, and in all contributors faces. Which means all contributors, regardless of their ...orientation, will have some sense of the health of a critically important part of the eco-system. It also offers better data to strategy discussions and whatnot. Remeber, this isn't about 'the vast majority of other D users'. This is about the VAST majority who _are not yet D users_. And many of them consider lack of VisualStudio, or maybe another full featured IDE offering, a hands-down deal breaker. It's also a statement about the polish/ready-ness of the language. So I think it's in the interest of all D users to know about the health of this part of the ecosystem if they want to see the language succeed... which will eventually lead to abundance of libraries, and tested frameworks that the community today is simply too small to develop/maintain.
Maybe, maybe not. The "health" of this part of the ecosystem might become more visible, yes, but it won't necessarily mean it will get better. The case with DWT is a very close parallel: it got promoted as an official GUI toolkit, yet it didn't seem to have a visible effect on contributions.
But at this point I don't think it's worth guessing, we'll just have to wait and see.
-- Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
