dmd support for IDEs

Walter Bright newshound1 at digitalmars.com
Sat Oct 10 18:19:56 PDT 2009


In my discussions with companies about adopting D, the major barrier 
that comes up over and over isn't Tango vs Phobos, dmd being GPL, 
debugger support, libraries, bugs, etc., although those are important.

It's the IDE.

They say that the productivity gains of D's improvements are 
overbalanced by the loss of productivity by moving away from an IDE. And 
what is it about an IDE that is so productive? Intellisense (Microsoft's 
word for autocompletion).

So, while I'm not going to be writing an IDE, I figure that dmd can 
help. dmd already puts out .doc and .di files. How about putting out an 
xml file giving all the information needed for an IDE to implement 
autocompletion? There'd be one .xml file generated per .d source file.

The nice thing about an xml file is while D is relatively easy to parse, 
xml is trivial. Furthermore, an xml format would be fairly robust in the 
face of changes to D syntax.

What do you think?



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