dmd support for IDEs

[Ary Borenszweig]

Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 10/11/09 15:23, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> What do you think?
>>
>> So... my opinion (like some others, I see) is to either ask things to
>> the compiler directly (but here the compiler lacks some info, like exact
>> source range positions), or to have a compiler (not a full-blown one,
>> just the front-end) built into the IDE, and that's what Descent is.
>> Unfortunately Descent is sometimes slow, sometimes buggy, but that's
>> normal: just a few people develop and maintain it (so I can see a
>> similarity with dmd here, where each day I see two or three new bugs
>> reported). If more people were into it, more unit tests were written
>> into it and, most of all, more people would use it, it'll get better.
> 
> I use it almost at a daily base and it works great. I can't remember the 
> last time it cashed.

Wow, that's good news! :)