dmd support for IDEs

[Jason House]

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?

Which phases of compilation must finish for the generated information? How error tolerant will this process be? If a statement is incompletely typed, will there be useful output? etc...