Future of Descent and D Eclipse IDE

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 12/07/2010 21:31, Ellery Newcomer wrote:
> On 07/12/2010 02:45 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> So, yeah, as things are, I'm maintaining my approach with Mmrnmrhm:
>> writing and improving the (very basic) semantic engine from scratch, and
>> using DLTK.
>> As for the parser, it will continue to use Descent's parser, although
>> the parser is already a bit outdated for D2. :/ It would be great if
>> someone were to volunteer to update it... *wink* *wink* :p
>
> sigh, point me at the source
>

Great, but are you aware what this task entails? In other words, are you 
familiar with descent.compiler? Because this is a Java port of the DMD 
frontend, and I'm not sure how easy it is for someone else other than 
Ary to learn how to do this, there might be quite a bit of private 
knowledge. (we can ask him about this, of course)

>> But better yet would be to start coding our own custom parser (using a
>> parser generator like ANTLR for example), that could really be tailored
>> for IDE needs. In the medium/long term, that's probably what needs to be
>> done.
>>
>
> What in particular does an IDE need tailored to it?

Well, in terms of *pure functionality*, there is not much else an IDE 
needs, other than making sure it can get all source information (like 
node source text ranges, comments, etc.)
The big thing that can be tailored is performance: incremental parsing, 
being able to do different kinds of parsing with different levels of 
detail ("sub-parsing"?). Some of these performance features become very 
important for IDE scalability.
Good error-recovery is also important, although that is also usually 
useful for a compiler (even if not so much as an IDE).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer