dmd support for IDEs

Jeremie Pelletier jeremiep at gmail.com
Tue Oct 13 00:34:35 PDT 2009


Walter Bright wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> That could be true, but you said the thing that prompted this idea was
>> enterprise-y customers looking for an enterprise-y IDE.  Vim ain't on
>> that roster.
> 
> This thread makes it fairly clear that this idea won't fill the bill for 
> a full featured IDE. But I think supporting a lightweight one is still 
> getting us closer.

I completely agree, nobody will code a monster IDE like Eclipse or 
Visual Studio dedicated to D anytime soon.

I have only respect for Descent, I use it on linux and it is really 
great. But Eclipse is killing me, there is no reason for an IDE to be 
that heavy, slow and unresponsive. How come a database server can pull 
off any data query from a multi-gigabyte database on disk in half a 
millisecond yet Eclipse can't seem to feel responsive when working with 
less than a hundred megabytes in system memory. (On that note, D needs a 
b-tree module among others :x)

I really feel we need a dedicated D IDE to promote the language, and 
such an IDE needs to start somewhere, most only do syntax highlighting 
so far, which is trivial to implement. A compiler interface to at least 
get semantics information from the source files is therefore a *big* 
plus in that direction.

XML output can also be used in so many different ways, for 
documentation, bindings, analysis and more. And JSON output can be used 
directly from any language with a very lightweight parser.

Besides, this doesn't mean Walter is going to put everything on hold to 
implement this feature, I think he only wanted to get feedback on an 
idea he had so when he gets time to implement it, he knows what the 
community wants.

Jeremie



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