language_fan wrote: > Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:19:56 -0700, Walter Bright thusly wrote: > >> In my discussions with companies about adopting D, the major barrier >> that comes up over and over isn't Tango vs Phobos, dmd being GPL, >> debugger support, libraries, bugs, etc., although those are important. >> >> It's the IDE. >> >> They say that the productivity gains of D's improvements are >> overbalanced by the loss of productivity by moving away from an IDE. And >> what is it about an IDE that is so productive? Intellisense (Microsoft's >> word for autocompletion). >> >> So, while I'm not going to be writing an IDE, I figure that dmd can >> help. dmd already puts out .doc and .di files. How about putting out an >> xml file giving all the information needed for an IDE to implement >> autocompletion? There'd be one .xml file generated per .d source file. >> >> The nice thing about an xml file is while D is relatively easy to parse, >> xml is trivial. Furthermore, an xml format would be fairly robust in the >> face of changes to D syntax. >> >> What do you think? > > Well since there is already a project working on an Eclipse plugin, I see > little use for other IDEs at the moment. The D community is rather small > and only a small amount of people are capable of developing and willing > to donate their free time on free IDE development (commercial IDEs have > small potential now that Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ/KDevelop/Visual Studio > dominate the market). So why not concentrate on fixing the spec and > fixing compiler bugs instead of building a modest IDE support no one will > use?
Because people do see the use of other IDEs (counting vim here too as an IDE) and xml / json output is useful for more than just IDEs.
