dmd support for IDEs

[Bill Baxter]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

>> Specifying an intermediate json/xml file format is a huge task considering
>> the amount of language constructs, types etc. available in D.
>
> It isn't. It's far less work than ddoc is, for example.
>
>> I'm all for good tool support but as many have already mentioned, the
>> support would only bring marginal improvements to small scale tools like vim
>> and emacs. Usually small scale D projects (< 10000 lines of code) are
>> written with those tools (feel free to prove me wrong). These are not the
>> kinds of projects large enterprises would use D for, they use scripting
>> languages for smaller tasks. Thus the overall improvement is minimal.
>
> I think the bang for the buck on this is large.

Even if this turns out to be useless for IDEs, it'll still be good for
creating external documentation generators that go beyond what DDoc is
capable of providing.   I think the subject of DDoc's limitations has
come up more than once here.   Put in another light, it sounds like
this would basically be the D equivalent of GCC-XML.  Which I think
has been found to have many interesting uses.   For instance Gregor
used GCC-XML to put together a D bindings generator for C code.   With
this XML/JSON output, someone could do similar and write a <your
language here> bindings generator for D code.   That could be handy if
you want to call your D code from C or C# or whatever.

But it doesn't sound to me like it will be that much use to serious IDEs.

--bb