On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 04:29:22 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
I don't know if I can express how strongly I disagree with that
sentiment. I don't use dub, I don't really want to use dub, and
I am virtually certain that the whole concept of using dub is a
going to make newbie acceptance much more difficult. D is
supposed to make life easier, not harder.
DUB is great if you're an experienced linux dev. But for
somebody just getting started, especially those coming from
other languages with standard libraries (aka, all of them) the
idea of having to use a package manager to do anything is
completely backwards. We need to be reducing our project setup
times, not increasing them by making people download the same
10 packages for every project they start. People want to
download a language and start writing code. Not faff about with
getting the right package configuration just to write some
output to the console.
You're greatly underestimating just how easy dub makes developing
with D. I'm by no means a Linux dev. My life has been lived on
Windows. But I use dub exclusively now and would love to see it
packaged with DMD and become the de facto way to get D libraries.
If Phobos were to be broken into a set of dub packages, even
better.
Setting up a package.json for a new project is extremely easy.
Once it's done you can copy it around for future projects with
minor changes. Compilation, in its simplest form, then becomes:
dub build
And all the libraries you need are automatically pulled down.
Then they are available for any other projects that need them. It
doesn't get any easier than that.
Plus, once all of the D IDEs get support for it worked out, you
then have one universal project configuration tool. No more need
to provide build scripts, make files, Visual Studio solutions,
MonoD projects, or whatever else. No matter your choice of text
editor/IDE, one configuration file rules them all.
Ultimately, this would make it much, much easier to get started
with D. So far, my experience in using dub with Derelict has
suggested this to be true. I still get people asking for help
with using Derelict 3 without dub, often because they don't know
how to configure the import path or the linker in their IDE, or
don't understand what it even means (and, apparently, have failed
to read any documentation on the subject). I've gotten *zero*
compile/link issues about building with dub. Maybe that just
means the newbies aren't using dub, or that they aren't reporting
their problems to me, but I suspect it's because dub is easy.
