dmd support for IDEs

[Christopher Wright]

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?

The huge things are:
  - code navigation (go to definition / find usages)
  - reformatting
  - refactoring
  - autocompletion

Code navigation alone is a huge help, and with reliable autocompletion 
would be sufficient for me to switch from vim. What you are suggesting 
would make both of those easier, though the IDE might need to duplicate 
D's symbol lookup.

I'm not sure whether what you are talking about will help at all with 
reformatting or refactoring, and I really have no idea what would be 
required for this.