Hi Clojurers, I'm building a tool for Clojure and I've been hitting the same bump for quite some time now, namely auto-completion and finding the definition of a symbol. After doing some research I've found that some tools rely on a running REPL to figure out where a symbol might be coming from; these include emacs [1], Counter-Clockwise, clooj and maybe others I don't know about (like Nightcode or Cursive). This seems the natural thing to do since while developing we always have a REPL running to try out what we code, after all this is one of the best LISP features. This approach results in very accurate locations for global symbol definitions, but locals are not found since they are not accesible form the REPL.
Another approach I've seen used for auto-completion in Clojure is the token-based, which involves looking for tokens in the code base associated with the current project and then providing the nearest match regardless of context; these include J Editor [2], Light Table (which I think uses inter-buffer token matching [3]) and emacs when it uses dictionary files (maybe not specifically in existing Clojure modes but it's something that emacs can do). Although this approach resolves the auto-completion, it is not very accurate when locating symbol definitions. >From what I've read this is not a trivial problem so I was wondering if there's some implementation that actually resolves symbols statically (I mean without having a running REPL) in an accurate way or, if there's no implementation, maybe someone could point me in the right direction (or any direction) as to what would ease the pain to accomplish such a task. Building something on my own to do this "static symbol resolution" is out of the question, since that sounds like a whole project on its own and I'm currently trying to build something else entirely. There are parsing libraries which provide good parse trees (i.e. Parsley, Instaparse), but my understanding is that what needs to be mantained is a full abstract syntax tree for the whole code base and although clojure.tools.analyzer [4] does the job of creating an AST, generating and mantaining all these trees sounds very costly and not the right way to do it. If the running REPL approach is the saner one, then I would have no problem with going down that road, but I just wanted to make sure what the viable options were. If you got this far, thank you for your time. :) Any help, thoughts or comments will be greatly appreciated! Juan [1] https://github.com/clojure-emacs/ac-nrepl [2] http://armedbear-j.sourceforge.net/ [3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/light-table-discussion/Q-ZvOJSr1qo/-D6tAV_XiMUJ [4] https://github.com/clojure/tools.analyzer -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
