On Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 03:46:35 UTC, codephantom wrote:
On Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 02:09:31 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
It seems to me that you have a major case of anti-windows bias
here, as I never have any issues on my main windows machine.
Actually, it's the very opposite...I'm strongly arguing 'for' D
on Windows.
(otherwise I wouldn't have wasted my time with this).
If you're ok with having VS, then that is not too much of pain
to install..I get it.
But if you don't want VS, then it really is a pain. You have to
work out what is the min required components....all by yourself
- like i had to do. That really was a pain!
I want D on Windows (64bit included), and I want it to be a
better experience than what I had...that's been the whole point
of my involvement in the discussion.
In essence, I'm an advocate for D on Windows ;-)
(but to do that, without being forced to advocate for VS as
well..is kinda challenging..it seems)
It's D I'm interested in. Not VS.
Just a little answer so that you see that you're not alone with
your concerns. I think you're absolutely right and that your
experiment was nicely done and clear from the beginning what it
was about. Reading is a skill that some people seem to have
problems with.
To my experience now. I finally managed to install VS2017 by
doing essentially the sleep during download thing to get the
offline installer. My Internet is not especially bad but not good
either (5 Mb down, 1 Mb up ADSL with very fluctuating latencies)
and the download took also several hours. For 1.6 GB it's really
slow. It has probably more to do with the Microsoft download code
than anything else (as the discussions in the link someone
provided tend to show).
The good thing is that it is now possible to install VS2017 on a
relatively small system partition, a thing that I didn't manage
to do with VS2013 and VS2015. The DMD installer also had no
problem to install the Visual-D plug-in and I managed to build my
project in 32 and 64 bit.
This said, it's the whole VS experience that I'm really annoyed
with. MS goes really out of its way to make the whole IDE as
magical as possible, i.e. everything is set so that the gritty
reality of code generation is hidden from the developer. The more
it goes, the less obvious it gets to install unconventional
things in the environment. Even simple stuff can become a real
pain. For instance, I like to have visible white spaces when
editing code (yeah, I hate tabs in program code). In all editors
and IDE I have tried yet, it was easy to set, when not in an
appearance toolbar, it's somewhere in "view" or "edit" menu. In
VS, it was a chore to find and I had to customize a tool bar
using 5 deep dialog box galore. Annoying. I can understand how
and why MS do it that way. When you work a little bit longer with
it, it is really sleek and nicely integrated in the system. The
thing is, it that it removes the perspective of what really
happens when building a program (object files, libs, linking
etc.) and that's the reason why we get so regularely the
complaints about the "Windows experience sucking": MS has
nurtured a generation of devs who have no clue what building an
app entails.
To conclude: if D wants to cater to that crowd, it will have to
bite the bullet and make the Windows experience even smoother
than it is now. You won't overcome Windows dev's Stockholm
syndrome otherwise and Windows devs, should also peg down a
little bit and learn that MS's way of doing things is far from
being ideal (bloat, loss of control, changing specs every 3
years, programmed obsolescence (Active-X anyone?)).
