Descent

Ary Manzana ary at esperanto.org.ar
Mon Aug 27 11:43:50 PDT 2007


Thanks for the nice words. :)

As Robert said, we are now focusing on other stuff first. My idea is the 
following:

1. Finish porting the semantic code from DMD. In this point, you'll get 
error squiggles each time you stop typing for a while. I found having an 
immediate response of errors to be very useful, since you can instantly 
correct your code and have it always working.
2. Since some of the errors above may include things like "member not 
found" or "type not found", it's a step away from using that information 
for autocompletion, or for organizing imports.
3. Finally, we would be able to use the information above to smartly 
compile the files, i.e., compile only what is needed. The compilation 
and probably linkage will happen each time you save a file, as in JDT.

Note that you only need to compile and link your files when you want to 
test your project or deliver it. Usually you also compile to check if 
there are errors in what you wrote. Now imagine Descent never compiles 
the files for you, but always tells you the same errors as the compiler. 
Then you'll be a lot of time typing, correcting errors, making 
refactors... and at last, you'll open up a console, compile everything 
(which is just a dummy step to make your code actually executable... in 
an interpreted language this step doesn't exist) and run it. Of course, 
Descent will also compile the files for you, but it's the last step 
we'll make.

Does this makes sense?

Regards,
Ary

David B. Held wrote:
> Hey, Descent looks really awesome now!  I can tell you guys have been 
> working hard on it because it's got a full formatter page and 
> everything.  I can even make it use spaces instead of tabs...good work! 
>  I also note that it does something really interesting with templates in 
> the outline view, but I haven't played around with that much.  What I am 
> wondering about are two things:
> 
> 1) Build integration.  I notice a descent.launching package in the 
> source which I assume is for dmd integration, and I notice that on a 
> Java project, I can do Run As...D Application, but I can't do that on my 
> D code!  Very weird!
> 
> 2) DSSS integration.  I'm not sure this totally makes sense or not, but 
> I'd like to hear some thoughts on it.  It would be cool to have 
> something like Create Project from DSource... that would be like Create 
> from SVN...
> 
> Anyway, it's good to see all this project on the plugin, and anyone else 
> who hasn't tried Descent yet, you need to give it a good look now!
> 
> Dave



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