dmd support for IDEs

[Jordan Miner]

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?

This is a great idea. If I every work on an IDE, I would use this. (I don't use IDEs. I like them, but I haven't found one that keeps out of my way enough.)

And this output isn't just useful for IDEs. Once I get time a couple months from now, I am going to finish a program that generates much better documentation files than Ddoc. So far, I have Ddoc generate custom output that I parse, but it still isn't very machine readable. Instead, I would use this provided it has all the information that Ddoc generates.