Code Poet, an IDE for D

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Nick B wrote:
> Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
>> It's been some time since I last posted to this newsgroup, I've been 
>> quite busy these past weeks!
>>
>> Among other things, I started writing an IDE for D from scratch and 
>> opened a SourceForge project for it a few minutes ago, I'll also open 
>> a dsource project to link to the sf one in the following days.
>>
> [snip]
> 
> Jeremie
> 
> On 12 Oct 2009 you wrote:
> 
> "Eclipse is heavy, slow and often unresponsive. I use poseidon myself 
> because it is light and fast and I don't require much more from an IDE 
> at the moment."
> 
> Would you like to enlighten us as to why you have decided to write your 
> own IDE & debugger, and give up Poseidon.
> 
> cheers
> Nick B

Sure, I really like Poseidon, but I got to the limit of its features and 
  then it crashed one time too many on me (good thing I ctrl+S even few 
keystrokes) :x

I've been using poseidon for over a year and a half now, and it has been 
great, only having a project manager and syntax highlighter and nothing 
else to depend on is a great way to learn about a language because it 
forces you to memorize everything.

Many reasons lead me to decide to write my own IDE, its a project that 
I've been considering for quite some time now as a stepping stone to 
other long term ideas I have which would require such an IDE.

I considered trying to pick up the poseidon sources and extending it, 
but porting it to DMD2 sounded like too much work. Working with the 
existing source implied using old versions of dwt and tango, two 
libraries I have no experience with.

For one, I recently got addicted to the split window feature of 
VisualStudio and I found out that wxAUI implements it out of the box and 
in a better way than VS. You can drag and drop tabs to create new 
groups, and you're not limited to only one direction at a time.

Intellisense was also another motivation, while its not needed to write 
code, its sure helps speed up the process, especially with those 
function parameter tooltips and autocompletion for the longer identifier 
names.

Furthermore, Poseidon will only works with D code and only compile with 
dmd. I wanted to be able to use multiple languages and compilers side by 
side in the same project.

As for debugging, poseidon's support for ddbg is great, but not nearly 
as powerful and practical as the debugging features of visual studio.

Jumping back in C++ was refreshing, I now make very little use of 
macros, feel much more comfortable with templates and generic 
programming, basically I write C++ as if I was writing D, and it only 
makes me love the little conveniences of D even more.

The IDE will also be cross-platform, I'm using wxWidgets for all the 
user interface and boost for everything else.

Some things I have in mind for later in the development cycle are tasks, 
semantic analysis, version control for projects, automake and autoconf 
integration on unix, etc...


Jeremie