dmd support for IDEs

[language_fan]

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:19:56 -0700, Walter Bright thusly 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 since there is already a project working on an Eclipse plugin, I see 
little use for other IDEs at the moment. The D community is rather small 
and only a small amount of people are capable of developing and willing 
to donate their free time on free IDE development (commercial IDEs have 
small potential now that Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ/KDevelop/Visual Studio 
dominate the market). So why not concentrate on fixing the spec and 
fixing compiler bugs instead of building a modest IDE support no one will 
use?