Future of Descent and D Eclipse IDE

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 25/05/2010 14:06, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2010-05-25 04.15, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> On 05/24/2010 08:38 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> I'm now in a position where I can dedicate a lot of free time for an
>>> open source project, and I'm seriously considering going back working on
>>> the D Eclipse IDE project. I worked on Mmrnmhrm a couple of years ago,
>>> as part of my thesis, which led to some restrictions on the kinds of
>>> tasks I should work on. Now I don't have that issue, I have (almost)
>>> complete freedom on what I can work on, and in particular I would like
>>> to unify the two current efforts for a D Eclipse IDE: Descent and
>>> Mmrnmhrm, as there is a lot of work being put into both (especially
>>> Descent ^^ )
>>>
>>> Now, Ary has been inactive for quite a while, and he said he wasn't
>>> interested in working in Descent any more :(
>>
>> I know I told you that, but now that I think of it, it's not that I'm
>> not interested. The project has grown too big and in the last releases I
>> added nice features without thinking much about the design and the
>> flexibility of growth... so now I feel the project is kind of a mess and
>> it's very hard to continue it. The problems I see are:
>>
>> * Porting DMD source to Java was done manually and it's a very boring
>> and long task, and we need to find a way to automate it if we'd like to
>> support really good integration with the language (I mean, real semantic
>> value, and because D is not dynamic I think this is worth it).
>
> I have two suggestions for this problem:
>
> 1. Could DMD be compiled to a dynamic library and then be used like a
> plugin, using JNI to interact between the compiler and the plugin.
>

Nope, the compiler generates a big structure, an AST, which is composed 
of nodes from a complex hierarchy of classes. Transferring such 
sctructure across JNI would be incredibly hard do implement, not to 
mention probably inefficient. JNI (as with most any C interfacing) is 
good mostly just for calling C methods with simple parameters.

The other option would be for the compiler to expose just a thin API 
(without big data structures), and have the IDE query the semantic 
functionality directly to the compiler. But then the frontend itself 
would have to be extended a lot, which would me a lot of complicated 
coding in C... argh, no way...


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer