Development tools

Building

See Build Tools.

Documentation

Built-in

• The D programming language has a built-in code documentation language (DDoc) and documentation generation, enabled by the -D compiler switch.

• The dman tool can be used to quickly look up D keywords or standard library symbols.

Third-party

See the documentation generators section in Community:Open_Source_Projects.

Source code

• dfmt - formats D code

• dfix - automatically updates D code

See also: Binding generators

Debugging

Built-in

Language features

The D programming language has built-in support for a number of debugging features:

• Asserts, invariants, and contract programming (enabled by default, disabled by the -release compiler switch)
• Array bounds checking (enabled by default, disabled by the -release or -boundscheck=off compiler switches)
• Unit tests (enabled by the -unittest compiler switch.

Coverage analysis

The D compiler can generate code coverage reports, enabled by the -cov compiler switch. See the Code Coverage page for more information.

Third-party

See the Debuggers page for a list of third-party debuggers.

See also: Troubleshooting Tools

Profiling

Built-in

CPU profiling

The D compiler can instrument generated code to measure per-function profiling information, and save a report on program exit. This is enabled by the -profile compiler switch.

Heap profiling

Starting with DMD 2.068, the D compiler can instrument memory allocations, and save a report on program exit. This is enabled by the -profile=gc compiler switch.

Third party

CPU profiling

• Callgrind (from Valgrind) works well with D. D symbols will need be demangled (see #Demangling below).

• Very Sleepy is a polling CPU profiler for Windows which works well with D. Debug information must be in PDB format (can be done by compiling with -m64, -m32mscoff, or by converting it using cv2pdb).

File size profiling

• D map treemap viewer can visualize a .map file in a treemap, and allows seeing at a glance what is using the most space in a compiled executable. Generating map files can be enabled with the -map compiler switch.
• On the same page is a tool which attempts to disassemble an ELF binary, and finds which symbol is pulling in which symbol.

Integration

Demangling

To demangle D symbols emitted by third-party programs, pipe the output through the ddemangle tool. The tool will recognize D symbols in its input, and replace them with the demangled versions, while outputting all other input intact.

D language development

These tools may be helpful when submitting D bugs, or when working on D itself:

• DustMite can reduce a large program to a small one by performing reductions which satisfy a given condition (e.g. that a certain error message is reproduced).

• Digger can build D, including old versions of D, and bisect D's history to find which commit fixed or introduced a bug.

• TrenD ("Is D slim yet?") measures and visualizes D's history across a number of parameters.