News and Opinions of the Digital Mars D Programming Language
Anyone not satisfied with the D IDE situation has a new option to investigate: SkyIDE. In addition to D, it also has support for Java and some C++ compilers (including DMC). Unfortunately for you Tuxheads, it only runs on WindowsXP (and soon, Windows2K). I’ll probably give it a spin over the weekend.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, C++, Java, IDE, programming
The upgrade is finished and it appears that I didn’t goof anything. If that holds true, that will be 2/3 successful blog updates in one round. That’s a new record for me. Next time maybe I’ll hit 3/3.
I was waiting for DSource to come back up before continuing with my missed announcements. Now, it is. So, now I am.
The D Shared Software System (DSSS) was announced by Gregor Richards a few days ago. It’s a really ambitious project that builds on bud “to create a standardized system for building, installing, configuring, acquiring and using D software”. I haven’t used it yet, but I certainly intend to give it a look-see. Be sure to visit the project forum for help and feedback.
Also recently announced is Bill Baxter’s Luigi, “a platform-independent native-D OpenGL-based GUI drawing library”. There’s not yet anything to download, but you can read about it on the project page. Hopefully, Bill will change his mind about reading the project forum now that DSource seems to be exponentially snappier than before.
Another new project at DSource is Ary Manzana’s Descent, a new Eclipse plugin for D. An interesting approach being taken with this project is that the DMD front-end is being ported to Java. Wow. Ever since I wrote my first line of D code I’ve been using Crimson Editor in conjunction with the command prompt. None of the Eclipse plugins or other IDE extensions have really done it for me. But I’m suddenly looking forward to this project. I’m firmly entrenched in the Eclipse camp for Java development and, as much as I love CE, would be quite happy to see a solid, full-featured, stable plugin for D. Don’t forget to visit the Descent forum.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, OpenGL, GUI, Eclipse, DSource
I’ve seen people gripe on the NG before that, when it comes to D features, Walter listens to C++ gurus who don’t use D (such as Andrei Alexandrescu) while ignoring those who currently use it. Anyone who has been around D for a while knows that such criticisms are unwarranted, as Walter has shown again with the newly released DMD 0.174. People have been complaining about the ambiguousness of the auto keyword, i.e. it’s use for both RAII and type inference, for some time now. In the new release, Walter has addressed those complaints by implementing a suggestion from the NG: the scope keyword can now be used for RAII.
Walter does listen, but he’s not going to implement every little suggested feature or change things that work just because a number of users aren’t happy with them. It may take time to convince him of some things, but when he sees sense in a suggestion he will implement it. To me, Walter’s measured flexibility is one of the strengths of D. Any good software product can be ruined if the developer(s) implements every user request that comes along and can be equally ruined by ignoring users entirely. But there is a middle ground where compromises can be made that result in an overall better product. D’s evolution has been guided with a firm hand by Walter, but would not be what it is without user input.
Several other enhancements, some user-requested, were added in this release along with a handful of deprecations and a peck of bug fixes. Thanks, Walter!
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, DMD, Digital Mars, Walter Bright
I’m finally getting around to posting some of the news I’ve failed to post over the past few days, primarily for those who don’t regularly read the NGs. First up, Will DeVore has released Bosskoneun, a 2D shmup that uses a few of the Derelict bindings. Right now, I don’t know whether to congratulate him or curse him — he did a great job with the game, but now I can’t get my wife off of my computer long enough to get any work done. She loves games like this. I’ve managed to kill quite a bit of time with it myself. It’s one of those games that is oddly addicting, each time you play you want to live longer than the last time or beat your previous score.
Great job, Will. Keep ‘em coming.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Derelict, games, SDL, OpenGL, 2D, graphics