dmd support for IDEs

[Robert Clipsham]

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?

How well will this work with partially parsable files? Will it recover 
and continue parsing the rest of the file, so all the gained data is 
still there in the rest of the file, or will it give an error and make 
the rest of the file lack autocompletion? Or is the idea to merge the 
newly parsed output with an old version so everything still has 
autocompletion but the line in question has an error?

Will it be possible to pass individual statements (maybe along with a 
previous symbol table) to dmd to save reparsing the whole file?

Other than that is sounds like a great idea, I can't wait for someone to 
write an omnicompletion plugin for vim using this!