Descent Rocks!
Monday, April 14th, 2008I’ve long wanted to ditch Crimson Editor for something more robust when programming D, but I’m very picky. Having used CE for so long, and not just for D, I was settled in. I had tried a couple of different releases of Descent, but didn’t make the switch at the time for one reason or another. I decided to try it out again this weekend. Now I’m finally waving goodbye to CE.
Descent is still not at the stage where configuration is as automatic as I would like, but it’s not so painful. I’ve been using Eclipse for years with my Java projects anyway, so it’s not like I’m venturing off into uncharted waters. I do recall that I had a problem compiling Tango projects the last time I used it, because I had the same problem this time. Last time, I didn’t bother investigating. This time, I really wanted to use it so took a bit of time to see what was going on. Turns out that the problem had nothing to do with Eclipse, but with my PATH variable. I’ve been using batch files to launch self-contained environment configurations for Phobos and Tango and forgot that running DMD in the default environment would fail. So after some juggling of sc.ini files, modification of the command line, and configuration of DSSS, I can now compile Tango projects from within Eclipse with DSSS. Man, that’s a great feeling after working on the command line for so long.
Eventually, I’m going to set up separate environment configurations to launch Eclipse so that I can use both Phobos and Tango within it without modifying anything. It’s not a big priority at the moment, though.
Ary, Robert and all of the contributors to Descent have done an outstanding job. My productivity has gotten a nice boost thanks to the work they’ve done. And now I can finally recommend an IDE with confidence to people who ask me about D.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Eclipse, Descent, IDE
