dmd support for IDEs

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

XML makes sense when saving as a file and it can be transformed by XSLT 
to generate formatted html documentation and whatnot, while JSON is 
lightweight and better suited for pipes between dmd and the IDE.

>> 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.

The IDE usually keeps the files in memory and could therefore just call 
something like getSemantics(char** fileBuffers, int* fileSizes, int 
nFiles, ParseNode* parseTree) and have its parse nodes already allocated 
in process memory ready for use.

Considering a lot of IDEs like to re-parse the current file every time 
the keyboard is idle for a few seconds, this could really help 
performance, nothing is more annoying than an IDE that feels unresponsive.