On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 02:01:09PM +1000, Manu wrote: > On 10 December 2013 13:40, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote: > > > On 12/9/2013 7:04 PM, Manu wrote: > > > >> It would be amazing if there was some real effort put into a > >> convenient tooling API in the DMD front-end lib. > >> > > > > Generally, the best tools come from people who make them to please > > themselves, not from people who make them to someone else's spec. I > > suspect you'd make a very good refactoring tool. > > > > How about it? > > > > Not without a powerful semantic analysis library I wouldn't. Other's > have spent years now on semantic analysis libraries trying to > duplicate the understanding of the code that DMD must already have > while compiling.
We need to work on the "compiler as a library" project. A *lot* of code analysis tools are unnecessarily duplicating effort because the compiler is opaque; if compiler internals could be leveraged, this would open the door for powerful code analysis/manipulation tools, and they'd be *accurate*, and won't need endless maintenance to keep up with compiler changes. Well, they still require maintenance, but the effort would be far easier if much of the codebase is shared. T -- It only takes one twig to burn down a forest.