On 24/01/2013 13:25, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2013-01-24 14:12, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
That's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive!
BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've
developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write
that? Did you test it extensively or not so much?
I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long
it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing
the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for
it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and
time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a
lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being
tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being
tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time
writing tests...
How about reusing the one in VisualD, it's written in D? Sure it's a bit
more work since it's not written in a Java compatible language but it
might be worth it.
If I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD
parser since it looks just as good, if not better, and C# would be
easier to port to Java than D.
But the descent.compiler experience (parser ported from DMD's parser)
put me off that approach of porting from a parser in another language
(although the VisualD parser might have less shortcomings than using the
DMD parser since at least VisualD's parser is designed for IDE use). I
want to have more control over the parser, and be able to effect my own
changes in it (something tricky if you're porting - unless you give up
the porting at some point, and just fork your own version and use ir
from there)
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
