Good to hear from you, Miles!

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 3:25 AM, Miles Sabin <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is definitely a benefit to sharing infrastructure between IDEs
> *for a given language* (eg. there is a fair amount of sharing between
> the Scala tooling for Eclipse, Netbeans and IDEA), but I don't think
> this carries over to multiple languages in a way that Charlie's kind
> of proposal can address. That's because the bulk of that sharing would
> overlap with the IDE's own frameworks at one end and collide with
> language differences at the other (ie. the most interesting tooling is
> very language specific).

Yes, I agree here. It may be useful as the dirt-simplest dumb tooling
for an IDE, so that you can have mixed-language projects all compiling
together, but that's not the key benefit of an IDE. You'd still need
per-language tooling for the language's own specific details for it to
be useful.

It's also worth pointing out that this joint compiler probably
wouldn't be the *only* compilation phase for any of these languages,
since we still will produce our own "abnormal" bytecode and .class
files that have nothing to do with our Java-facing types. So it's
mostly an orchestration agent for the types we *do* expose and
consume. And again, this is what all the current joint compilers
actually give you, so let's do that once and be done with it.

> Here's an example. To enable cross language search and refactoring in
> Eclipse all participating languages need to hook into the JDT's
> indexer. Doing this is inescapably Eclipse-specific, and beyond the
> basic job of mapping non-Java language symbols into Java there's
> really nothing much to factor out which isn't either IDE-specific or
> language-specific.

Perhaps someone from IntelliJ will chime in about how they do their
cross-language refactoring, but it's a much, much more complicated
process than just getting languages to compile together when they may
have cross-language Java type exposure. It's definitely out of scope
for what I want...I just want a base compiler structure that I can
provide a few Ruby-specific plugins for and know that cross-compiling
with any other plugged language will just work. That's "easy".

- Charlie

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