Descent 0.5.4 released

[Ary Borenszweig]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> New features:
>>  - Compile-time view (Window -> Show View -> Other -> D -> Compile-time
>> View): allows you to see things from the compiler point of view, which
>> applies some transformations to the source code. For example you can see
>> what happens when you do a foreach, when you invoke an "extension
>> method", when you do operator overloading; know what type has an auto
>> variable; how struct fields are accessed?; compiler optimizations. It
>> also removes conditionals that evaluate to false, and shows the results
>> of mixins in-place. As always, this is far from perfect and a lot of
>> things can be improved. For the lazies, I'll later upload a video about
>> this. :-)
> 
> I've found one limitation of this, and it's a really weird one.  It
> seems that some combination of a double-quoted string inside a
> backtick-quoted string in a statement under a static if causes this to
> fall over and break it's legs.  The CT window just shows stuff like this:
> 
>> !descent.core.dom.CompilationUnit at 17c858d
> 
> I've attached the smallest test case I was able to make; hope it helps,
> because this is just about the BEST thing ever.  As someone who makes
> heavy use of meta-programming, this is fantastic.
> 
> Incidentally, the backtick-quoted string seems to make the editor VERY
> confused; try starting a `` literal, and pressing Enter inside.  Now
> imagine trying to write a big code mixin like that...
> 
>>  - Now hovering over a mixin (over the "mixin" keyword) shows it's
>> result in a popup.
> 
> *Glee*
> 
>>  - Now hovering over a function or template instance with ctrl+shift
>> shows it's compile-time result (with shift only: it's source code).
> 
> Indeed, it does!  This is SO awesome; now I don't have to muck about
> with pragma(msg,...) and compile-time formatting to check and make sure
> I'm not feeding the compiler garbage.
> 
>> [snip]
>>
>> Enjoy!
> 
> I've never been big on IDEs; I never felt that they had enough
> advantages over a plain text editor to make up for the slowness and
> restrictions.
> 
> But this is just so freaking awesome, I'm seriously considering moving
> over to Descent for my D development.  It's just a pity I can't have my
> Vim editing commands, too :P
> 
>  -- Daniel
> 

Wow! Thanks for the joyful answer, Daniel. :-)

The attachment you sent doesn't compile, it gives a syntax error in the 
mixed content for the IsExpression (only a type is allowed, not 
"this."). Anyway, I'll change the 
"!descent.core.dom.CompilationUnit at 17c858d" message to something like 
"Module foo has syntax or semantic errors due to mixins".