Time to invent a different file format to hold meta data info

[Simon Gomizelj]

On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:09:28 -0400, Unknown W. Brackets  
<unknown at simplemachines.org> wrote:

Check out clang. LLVM frontend for C, C++, and Objective-C which has  
similar IDE intergration in mind.
Maybe ldc can take this route?

> Actually, I think it would be much more fruitful to have a standard way  
> to integrate a compiler into an IDE.  An API would be needed with things  
> like: (all optional)
>
> 1. Lex a file (returning basic token information.)
> 2. Parse a file (returning some sort of standardized syntax tree.)
> 3. Compile a file (returning various error structures.)
> 4. List common keywords in the language.
> 5. Syntax check a file (no output, just the errors.)
>
> To put it in code, imagine this:
>
> ---
> compiler_syntax_func_t syntaxcheck = get_compiler_sym("syntaxcheck");
> char[] source_data = get_editor_source();
> compiler_error_t* compiler_errors;
>
> compiler_errors = syntaxcheck(source_data.ptr, source_data.length);
>
> compiler_error_t[] errors;
> for (auto p = compiler_errors; *p; p++)
>     errors ~= (*p).dup;
>
> compiler_free_func_t compiler_free = get_compiler_sym("compiler_free");
> compiler_free(compiler_errors);
> ---
>
> Of course, I'm sure a better API could be devised.  This sort of format,  
> if properly standardized, could be used to make IDEs much more  
> efficient.  It would also allow for much better and more accurate error  
> reporting, and the compiler could be loaded as a shared object so that  
> initialization cost would be low.
>
> Most language services for Visual Studio are essentially a large part of  
> the compiler (often reimplemented in C# or some such) without the code  
> generation.  It seems like such a silly and obvious waste to me.
>
> -[Unknown]
>
>
> davidl wrote:
>>  I hope it will be integrated to the Compiler. As IDE should not deal  
>> with language changes.
>> Dealing with parsing sources of D1, D2, D3, D4... is actually  
>> cumbersome. The IDE development gets hindered because the  
>> autocompletion must be able to parse both D1/D2 and future DMD  
>> releases. And endless bug fixes.
>>  An extendible while relatively more stable metadata file format may  
>> greatly ease IDE development.



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