I’m on an adventure.
I’m searching for a comfortable development environment for Walter Bright’s D Programming Language.
I’m reading Andre Alexandresu’s book on D Programming. Get it! If for nothing else, because the book highlights certain drawbacks of the C++ language. You won’t find many books that do so with such insight.
I’m on a Mactop. I’m by no means an expert - my main development machine has always been a Windows box. Although I’m fairly familiar with the unix environment. So I thought I’d go with a “traditional” unix developer’s setup.
So far, I’ve installed MacPorts and Exuberant Ctags 5.8, MacVim, and the dmd2 compiler.
I’m about to apply the D patch for ctags found here.
I did get the D for XCode plugin to work: it looks pretty, and I imagine it’s good for mixing in development with Cocoa libraries and Objective-C & C++. But it probably won’t be terribly useful for me right now – no “real” command completion, and no debugger support. (Btw, there were two hiccups on install. I had to change default access permissions on the plugin folder that was created, and remove a phantom symbolic link to libdruntime.a.)
I also tinkered a bit with Code::Blocks; I also installed Aquamacs, and CEDET, and that toolchain, but I’m not even sure there is a D solution for this environment, although that might be a fun weekend project. So I’m going to move forward with MacVim first. Something about the economy of Vim attracts me…
Funny, I’m doing everything right now but D programming. But, I’m learning a whole lot about portable, open source hacker tools – which is half the fun.
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Update: Looks like MacPorts doesn’t give you source code to play with. So I downloaded the code, applied the patch, and recompiled. Working – nice!
