On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
Just try getting D installed on all 3 major systems for DMD,
LDC, GDC, with an IDE, some utilities, possibly arm
support(even though it's new and expected to have some issues),
etc. The issues really start popping up when you are trying to
use x86 + x64. Library issues that result in strange error
messages instead of "This compiler is not compatible with the
phobos v2.4324".
Might be worth considering something like the Android SDK
installer. It looked like this:
http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/4515__android_sdk_1_8_5_15.png
Essentially it was a cross-platform package manager GUI, which
allowed installing platform support for various platform versions
side-by-side, as well as additional utilities and dependencies.
It also exposed its functionality via command-line tools and IDE
integrations. This translates fairly well to the D ecosystem, and
could serve as a decent work-around for Windows' lack of native
package management.
We have some of the pieces as separate tools (Digger, DVM, the
dlang.org/install.sh script, the Windows' installer's Visual
Studio detection/integration), could be nice tying them together
into a palatable GUI. Digger has a rudimentary one, which
probably could be wrapped into a native-like app using Electron,
but still lacking features such as managing GDC/LDC.
