dmd support for IDEs

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 10/11/09 11:56, Frank Benoit wrote:
> Walter Bright schrieb:
>> 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?
>
> If you use Eclipse for Java, you have:
> - Debugger in place
> - Automatic builder, compile on save
> * Jump to line from error list
> * Jump to declaration
> - Show JavaDoc in tooltip, even in autocompletion
> - Show hierarchy tree
> - Autocompletion
> - Quick assist, e.g.
> 	- assign ctor parameter to new field
> 	- extract selected text into local variable
> 	- Mark source portion, extract to method, the IDE evaluates the needed
> parameters and return value
> 	- ...
> There is so much more. But the main thing is, you are not only able to
> use grep and friends on the pure text level. With an IDE you have
> semantic support. This makes refactoring your code so much easier. You
> can say "rename this method" and it works, all references to this method
> are also altered. "Move this inner class to a top level class in that
> package", "Derive from that class, yes add the needed ctors". There is
> even an API to automate refactorings.
>
> I think Descent is the right way. But here, a port of DMD is directly
> integrated into the plugin. To put more manpower in this project would
> be the best way imo.

I completely agree. I don't know if it would be better to have the parts 
of dmd that descent needs in a separate library to avoid porting half of 
dmd to java.