Mono-D v0.4.9 - Rough formatting capability

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 24/01/2013 13:25, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-01-24 14:12, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>
>> That's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive!
>>
>> BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've
>> developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write
>> that? Did you test it extensively or not so much?
>>
>> I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long
>> it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing
>> the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for
>> it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and
>> time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a
>> lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being
>> tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being
>> tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time
>> writing tests...
>
> How about reusing the one in VisualD, it's written in D? Sure it's a bit
> more work since it's not written in a Java compatible language but it
> might be worth it.
>

If I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD 
parser since it looks just as good, if not better, and C# would be 
easier to port to Java than D.
But the descent.compiler experience (parser ported from DMD's parser) 
put me off that approach of porting from a parser in another language 
(although the VisualD parser might have less shortcomings than using the 
DMD parser since at least VisualD's parser is designed for IDE use). I 
want to have more control over the parser, and be able to effect my own 
changes in it (something tricky if you're porting - unless you give up 
the porting at some point, and just fork your own version and use ir 
from there)


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer