On Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:32:32 -0500, Denis Koroskin <2kor...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:19:56 +0400, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com> 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?
I believe it won't work. It will always be slow and incomplete.
Instead, I would make it easier to embed DMD into an IDE: separate DMDFE
from DMDBE, fix memory leaks, remove all the static data (so that code
would be re-intrable and it could work in different threads in
parallel), move most of DMD code into a DLL so that an IDE could
dynamically link with it and whatever it pleases with the source code.
In fact, that's what I do right now.
I'm writing my own D IDE in my spare time (in D, of course). I already
made a lot of progress and now it's time to start implementing source
code analysis.
First thing I did is I made complete D bindings for C++ code. It worked
out quite well but it was leaking so badly that I dropped it.
Instead, I started porting DMD entirely to D (except the backend, of
course), and I already got some great results. A few simple programs
compile and produce byte-perfect binaries. It's still in its early
stages and there is a lot of work to do, but it will be finished soon
(hopefully). It could probably become a part of an official
distribution, eventually. :)
If anyone is interested and is willing to test and/or help, I will
gladly share my code.
I would like it if this went open so I could examine it and possibly
contribute to it. I have wanted to do something like this, but all I have
started so far is a GUI toolkit. I am new to D so I have not spent much
time on it yet. It would be nice to be able to work on something more
developed.
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