Future of Descent and D Eclipse IDE

[Ellery Newcomer]

On 05/25/2010 03:31 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 25/05/2010 03:15, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> On 05/24/2010 08:38 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>
>> * 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).
>> * The DMD source was modified a little bit for performance reasons and
>> for integration with Descent so now it contains bugs that are very hard
>> to fix.
>
> That's actually exactly the concerns I had from the start with doing
> that approach. Even if we had an easy way to automate the port, I think
> we would still have a code that has issues of performance and
> scalability. And yet if we would try to modify it to address those
> issues, we would most likely introduce hard to correct bugs, and/or make
> the automated porting process (if we had one) much more complicated, if
> not impossible (aka, reverting to doing a lot of manual work).
>
> That's why I think the approach of porting the full DMD frontend is not
> good, even it was more automated. So for me its either:
>
> * Port and use the DMD parser only, and implement semantic analysys
> features by scratch. This is Mmrnmhrm's current approach, and would mean
> the semantic capabilities would be much less than Descent: likely just
> resolving references (for code completion), but no semantic errors or
> CTFE debug.
>
> * Try and build the parser and semantic engine with the help of some
> other tool, like IMP for example.

If anyone cares, I have a functioning ANTLR grammar for d1 for which I 
someday intend to write semantic for. I'm also mostly done with an ANTLR 
grammar for d2.

They're a bit on the slow side, but I think they can successfully parse 
things that dmd currently can't.