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?
Eclipse is heavy, slow and often unresponsive. I use poseidon myself
because it is light and fast and I don't require much more from an IDE
at the moment.
