Applications development with D language

Question

For those who had developed applications with D,

• which libraries did you use to build your application?
• those libraries were good documented?
• did you use Tango?
• do you feel that D is ready to build big applications?
• which IDE did you use? Descent maybe?

Answer 1

• I generally don't work on top of libs (aside from the std lib) as I tend to do very low level stuff, so "none"
• I use Phobos, but that's because I'm lazy and that's all that was around when I started.
• I'm using it in a commercial app. But we are very much in the early adopter segment.
• Descent is really making good progress. However for the stuff I do (very heavy template work) it is not up to the task. However for most things that should not be nearly as much of an issue.

Answer 2

• I use Tango, Jive stacktrace, dconstructor, dunit, and selfmock. I maintain the last three of those, though.

• Tango has reasonable documentation. I've run into a few places where it had less documentation than I needed; in these cases, I've made tickets requesting better documentation. Jive doesn't require documentation. I hope the others I use have reasonable documentation; I've been working on that a fair bit.

• Yes, I use Tango.

• You can create large applications in FORTRAN; D is better. The main issue is library support. Things like cryptography aren't well supported in D, as far as I know. But it's been pretty easy to find everything that I have needed. Anything else, you can probably write a wrapper around an existing library in C without much trouble.

• I usually use vim, but now I'm switching to Descent. Its autocompletion is far better than Vim's.

Answer 3

• Other than the core library (in my case, Tango), I'm not using any external libs.

• Tango documentation is decent. It's a large library, and I'd say there's documentation for about 80% of it, off the top of my head. And, of those documented classes, I'd say about 80% of them are complete and correct. Given the size of the library, the amount of documentation is impressive. But it's still not quite where it needs to be. In order to really use Tango right now, you have to read the source code (which is clean and well-written).

• I don't know whether D is ready for big applications. My application is pretty small, and I'm pretty happy with it. From a language-design perspective, I prefer C# (or Java, to a lesser extent). In comparison, the D language design strikes me as somewhat clunky and awkward. Really, the only reason I chose D for this project was because A) I needed to be able to compile my code to a DLL which could be linked by an arbitrary third party; B) I needed my code to be portable between Win, Lin, and Mac; and C) I didn't want to write in C/C++.

• I'm using Descent (an Eclipse IDE plugin). It provides reasonably good syntax highlighting and project navigation. Auto-complete still leaves much to be desired, and the integration with a "builder" like dsss is still lacking. But it's better than notepad :)