dmd support for IDEs

Ellery Newcomer ellery-newcomer at utulsa.edu
Sat Oct 10 20:47:53 PDT 2009


Walter Bright wrote:
> 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?

Well, that's a better solution than reimplementing semantic analysis in
the ide. If you make it, I will stop trying to do the latter.

In the xml, will we see ct stuff and other transformations that DMD
performs on the source expanded?

[very very minor] concerns:

standardized? DMD derivatives will have it, what about hypothetical
other D implementations?

If your ide can't see or doesn't have compiler, it won't be able to do
much (erm duh)

All in all, I think it would be the bomb. I'd even volunteer to help
implementing it if I thought my code contributions would do less harm
than good.



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