dmd support for IDEs

[BLS]

On 11/10/2009 03:19, 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?

FANTASTIC! Give it a go.

Despite the intention to support a D IDE ...
I would make sense to establish this feature in D1 too.
Imagine XML2D which may help to port D1 code to D2.

I would further suggest to consider to output to Oracle Berkeley DB XML ..
Having an XQuery-based access to D-sources.. I guess you can imagine 
what this could mean.

There are a couple of D IDEs around.
I think what people mean with there is no D IDE is simply : "We want a 
MS Visual Studio like IDE as part of the D tool chain" One download, 
that's it.
I agree. But we need a platform independent IDE.

Our Options :
1) Force Decent.. (Java/SWT)

2) Use gtkD, create the IDE in D. (the only usable platform independent 
  GUI atm.)

3) Use QT and C++. Let's re-use and adapt QT Creator.

Having QT as standard GUI toolkit for D means that we can also reuse the 
QT Designer.

Bjoern