What to do with Descent?

[Arlo White]

I just played with dmd 2.045 and Descent yesterday for the first time. 
Yes Descent is a bit buggy (couldn't get builds or context-assist 
working), but I still stuck with it because I'm familiar with Eclipse 
and none of the other D editors looked that mature either (or weren't 
available for Linux).

As someone mentioned, it's much easier for people to learn a new 
language if they don't have to learn a new IDE at the same time. Eclipse 
is a pretty solid platform to build on and a lot of people are familiar 
with it. If D expects to be a popular programming language an Eclipse 
plugin is almost a necessity.

True, not many people use Descent now, but if/when D becomes popular a 
lot of people will want a good Eclipse plugin, and you'll want to be 
ready for them, which means having Descent ready when D2 is.

I'm surprised that the language updates can't be automated, but I'm not 
familiar with how Eclipse does language syntax under the hood.

If the task is really that menial maybe it could be automatically 
divided up and farmed out to volunteers?

Could you add a page to your wiki describing the problem you're having 
keeping up with the language and some examples of how a D language 
change translates to a Descent change. Also, show why it's hard to 
automate. Then post a link here and maybe some people can look at the 
problem and give you ideas on how to automate it or divide up the task.

I would be willing help you out if you can describe what I need to do 
and where the code is. I downloaded the descent.core source, but there's 
a lot in there and I'm not even sure where the D language stuff is.


-Arlo