Descent 0.5.2 released

[Ary Borenszweig]

pragma escribió:
> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> Graham St Jack wrote:
>>> On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:10 -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>>> Enjoy!
>>>
>>> Good stuff!  What are your plans for D2 support?
>>
>> Maybe for the next release... It's just about porting DMD's code. If I 
>> do that in a rush, it gets boring, so I try to do that from time to 
>> time. Robert can agree with me. :-)
> 
> Out of curiosity: why not library-ize the DMD front-end and distribute 
> it along with a JNI wrapper?
> 
> It would take some work to get it properly wrapped and ported to your 
> target platforms (especially to OSX since there are few D'ers on that 
> platform), but the end result would keep you from having to trail 
> compiler releases and bug updates by a full porting cycle.  Also, at 
> least where Eclipse is concerned, OSGi has your back with making sure 
> that the right binary lib is used for JNI.
> 
> Just thinking out loud,
> - Pragma

We thought of that, but I think it's harder to do than the current 
approach. The code from DMD was changed in a lot of ways: source range 
information has been added to nodes, the visitor pattern has been 
applied, the problem reporting is different, some char[] handling 
optimizations added. In the end, it will be like programming in C++. 
And... C++ doesn't have *good* refactoring support, find all references, 
autocompletion, etc. And also, a build of the JNI wrapper must be done, 
and programing in JNI is not fun: creating an instance of a class or 
calling a method is terribly verbose and error-prone, specially if you 
rename/move a class used by JNI.

And now, it's not hard to update: just diff and port the differences. 
The hardest part was the beginning, when we had to figure out how to 
translate gotos, passing by reference, etc. :-)