dmd support for IDEs

[Walter Bright]

Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
> I think it would be great, but XML is only one format and a heavy one at 
> that, JSON for example is much lighter and easier to parse. It shouldn't 
> be hard to support both.

I'd never heard of JSON, but looking at it, it makes sense. I don't see 
much point in supporting both.

> However I would make the file generation optional, as the IDE might just 
> want to read from the standard output stream of dmd instead, this would 
> also be useful for shell scripts.

Yes, writing it to stdout as an option is a good idea.


> Support to get the semantics information of multiple files at once would 
> also be neat, just like dmd can generate one object file from multiple 
> source files.

Yes.

> Would it even be possible to have the C api behind the xml/json 
> frontends exported in a dll, so IDEs could just dynamically link to it 
> and call that API directly instead of parsing an intermediary text format.

I did that with the C++ compiler, and it's a big pain to support. I 
don't think it would be onerous to fork/exec the compiler to do the 
work, capture the output, and parse it.