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

Answer 1

I used tango libraries + dfl and a bit of my own. Tango documentation is excellent. DFL not bad. Yes I did use tango then but tried phobos at first. Ready for big apps? depends on what you mean. In production use I have only used it for frontends and updaters. So far I've only used vim to code and entice to design gui because I couldn't find the right ide for me.

Answer 2

• DFL (GUI), Decent (for OpenGL), CUDA (GPGPU)
• DFL was decently documented, but lacked cross referencing. Decent/ CUDA are mainly C wrappers, though D made making nice internal API for CUDA very easy.
• No, I've been using Phobos
• Yes, though there are certain types of big applications which would be much faster to write in another language.
• I've been using Code::blocks for my principal IDE and Entice for GUI design.

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 :)

Answer 4

Code blocks seems to support D.

Answer 5

• Mainly those I develop myself - SDWF and Stewart's Utility Library.
• I hope so.
• No.
• Yes, though I'm not sure that libraries and IDE support are quite ready yet. And D isn't quite ready for significant third-party implementation, which might play a part in reaching this stage.
• I do most of my editing in TextPad. Which admittedly isn't fully compatible with D (two missing syntax highlighting features, and doesn't support Unicode), but it works.

Answer 6

Note that any C library can be used with D, as D fully supports the C ABI. D has some limited support for C++ libraries, though not C++ template libraries.