dmd support for IDEs

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 10/11/09 16:38, BLS wrote:
> 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)

I think this the our best option now

> 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.

As far as I know neither Qt(d) or gtkD uses native controls on platforms 
other than linux, which to me is unacceptable. The look especially on mac.

4)
Port entire eclipse to D, Frank Benoit (who started DWT, the tango 
version) was thinking of this.

> Bjoern
>