Visual D 0.51.0 - semantic engine based on dmd frontend

[Rainer Schuetze]

Hello,

I'm happy to announce the release of Visual D 0.51.0.

Visual D is a Visual Studio extension that adds D language support to
VS2008-2019. The installers can be found at
http://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/StartPage.html


This version features a first version of an intellisense engine that is
based on the DMD frontend (as of version 2.090) for semantic analysis.
It is still considered experimental and has to be enabled on the
respective language options page. When comparing this new engine to the
regular engine which is based on DParser that used to power Mono-D:

- it does a full semantic analysis and shows the same errors as dmd
would do. DParser only marks parser issues.

- browsing compilable code works quite well (e.g. inference of auto
types is not an issue anymore).

- semantic highlighting is faster and more accurate.

- completion is yet not very good, especially while the currently edited
code has parsing errors.

- as dmd itself it can require quite a bit of memory, though a variety
of false and stale pointer issues have been fixed to help the precise GC.

Other highlights of this release:

- Ctrl+Click goto definition added for VS2017+

- visualdproj projects: basic DUB support: upgrade and refresh if
project contains dub.json or dub.sdl

See https://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/VersionHistory.html for
the complete list of changes

Cheers,
Rainer