On 2012-04-10 04:24, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 4/9/12 9:21 PM, Ary Manzana wrote:
Yes, D definitely needs that. The Eclipse plugin could just use bindings
to the D compiler API with JNI.
Would the JSON compiler output help?
Andrei
No, it's no way near sufficient for what Descent can do and what's
expected from an IDE these days, think JDT for Eclipse.
Descent can handle:
* Syntax highlighting
* Semantic highlighting
* Show lex, parse and semantic errors
* Compile time debugging
* Compile time view
* Formatting
* Show the actual type of an inferred or aliased type
* Smart autocompletion
* Many other things as well
Note that in addition to (most of) the above, JDT can handle a lot more.
The compiler is the only tool that can properly handle this. It's also
the only sane approach, to have the compiler usable as a library.
Just take a look how it used to be (and in some cases are) in the C/C++
world before Clang and LLVM came a long:
* You have the compiler
* An IDE with a "parser/compiler"
* The debugger with an (expression) "compiler"
All these "compilers" are different and need to stay in synch. That's
not how you do good software development. You build a compiler library
that can be used in all the above tools. BTW, it's only the real
compiler that can handle everything properly.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
