dmd support for IDEs

[Yigal Chripun]

On 11/10/2009 23:13, Walter Bright wrote:
> Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>> Walter Bright, el 11 de octubre a las 02:38 me escribiste:
>>> Lutger wrote:
>>>> What about file/line/column of the symbol? Is this much work /
>>>> hard work to add?
>>> file/line of course, but I don't see a point to column.
>>
>> See Clang error messages:
>> http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html
>>
>> That's *nice* =)
>>
>
> I agree, it looks good on paper.
>
> In fact, I implemented it in the C and C++ compiler from the beginning
> (1982 or so). It's still in dmc, try it - it'll print out the error
> message, followed by the source text of the offending line, followed by
> a ^ under where things went wrong.
>
> Nobody cared.
>
> Nobody has ever commented on it - and there have been hundreds of
> thousands of users of it. No magazine review ever mentioned it. When I
> mention it to people as "cool, look at this" they never respond. When
> the conversation is about the quality of error messages, that feature
> never comes up.
>
> So I dropped it for dmd.
>
> Nobody noticed.
>
> Nobody asked why it was done for dmc, and not for dmd. Nobody asked for
> it. Nothing. (Until now.)
>
> So I am hard pressed to believe this is a worthwhile feature. There is a
> cost to it in memory consumption and compiler execution time, so it's
> not quite free.

You assume everyone who uses DMD also uses DMC which is not necessarily 
the case.
More importantly, while this is a good feature, it is far better to have 
squiggly red lines in the IDE. I for one rely on those lines a lot.