On 8 December 2013 11:34, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
> On 12/7/2013 4:46 PM, Manu wrote: > >> True as compared to C, but I wouldn't say this is true in general. >> C# and Java make it easy to refactor code rapidly. D doesn't have any >> such tools >> yet. >> It's my #1 wishlist item for VisualD and Mono-D, and I await such tooling >> with >> great anticipation. >> Maybe when the D front-end is a library, and tooling has such powerful >> (and >> reliable) semantic analysis as the compiler does it may be possible? >> > > Needing a tool to refactor code is a bit of a mystery to me. I've never > used one, and never felt that not having one inhibited me from refactoring. > Well I'd suspect that given time to use one for a significant portion of time, you will come to appreciate how much time it can save :) At least in certain types of code, which perhaps you don't spend an awful lot of time writing? I find 'client code' tends to be subject to a higher frequency of trivial changes and refactorings. This sort of code is less concise, more random; just stuff that does stuff or responds to events or whatever written around the place. Systems code like compilers tend to be a lot more succinct, self contained and well structured which, supports simpler refactoring internally, but any such change may require a huge amount of client code to be re-jigged. It's nice to reliably automate this sort of thing. Trust me, robust refactoring tools save a lot of time! :)
