On 11/10/2009 03:19, 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?
FANTASTIC! Give it a go.
Despite the intention to support a D IDE ...
I would make sense to establish this feature in D1 too.
Imagine XML2D which may help to port D1 code to D2.
I would further suggest to consider to output to Oracle Berkeley DB XML ..
Having an XQuery-based access to D-sources.. I guess you can imagine
what this could mean.
There are a couple of D IDEs around.
I think what people mean with there is no D IDE is simply : "We want a
MS Visual Studio like IDE as part of the D tool chain" One download,
that's it.
I agree. But we need a platform independent IDE.
Our Options :
1) Force Decent.. (Java/SWT)
2) Use gtkD, create the IDE in D. (the only usable platform independent
GUI atm.)
3) Use QT and C++. Let's re-use and adapt QT Creator.
Having QT as standard GUI toolkit for D means that we can also reuse the
QT Designer.
Bjoern
