Walter Bright Wrote: > In my discussions with companies about adopting D, the major barrier > that comes up over and over isn't Tango vs Phobos, dmd being GPL, > debugger support, libraries, bugs, etc., although those are important. > > It's the IDE. > > They say that the productivity gains of D's improvements are > overbalanced by the loss of productivity by moving away from an IDE. And > what is it about an IDE that is so productive? Intellisense (Microsoft's > word for autocompletion). > > So, while I'm not going to be writing an IDE, I figure that dmd can > help. dmd already puts out .doc and .di files. How about putting out an > xml file giving all the information needed for an IDE to implement > autocompletion? There'd be one .xml file generated per .d source file. > > The nice thing about an xml file is while D is relatively easy to parse, > xml is trivial. Furthermore, an xml format would be fairly robust in the > face of changes to D syntax. > > What do you think?
This is a great idea. If I every work on an IDE, I would use this. (I don't use IDEs. I like them, but I haven't found one that keeps out of my way enough.) And this output isn't just useful for IDEs. Once I get time a couple months from now, I am going to finish a program that generates much better documentation files than Ddoc. So far, I have Ddoc generate custom output that I parse, but it still isn't very machine readable. Instead, I would use this provided it has all the information that Ddoc generates.