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by JNRowe·6y ago·view on hn ↗
My own pet peeve about D is the lack of local documentation. If I install my system's compiler packages¹ I receive basically no documentation at all. That is a huge difference to the experience with nim/rustc/go/$others which all provide a nice fat $lang-doc package in their Suggests field, and all of those contain full standard library docs/tutorials/etc.

1. gdc or ldc on Debian. The experience /may/ be different with the dmd repositories, but being external they're of less interest to me.

3 comments
D comes with an interesting utility called `dman`. Run it from the command line and as an argument give it a D topic and it'll open a browser on the topic.

    dman dman
will, of course, open the browser on a page about dman.
Which, as I noted, is still a very different experience from go/nim/rust in Debian. It wasn't a pet peeve about no documentation, it is about how I can interact with it compared to to other languages.
It is provided by dmd as part of the download.

You can also get soft copies (i.e. mobi, pdf) and the docs as part of the d-apt repository for debian.

Depending on the nature of distribution it is probably just in a different package (or the package maintainer needs yelling at).

https://d-apt.sourceforge.io

> It is provided by dmd as part of the download.

Which leads me to wonder why we don't have dmd{,-doc} in Debian now, given it has been ~3 years since the compiler was open sourced. I can't even find an ITP in a quick search :/

D command line tools have a `-man` switch which will open the browser on the manual for the tool, such as:

    dmd -man
I'd recommend using Dash (on Os X) or Zeal (Linux and Windows) if you want to have an easily browseable local version of the docs.