Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 19/11/2010 22:02, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, November 19, 2010 13:53:12 Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> On 19/11/2010 21:27, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>
>> And by providing a lexer and a parser outside the standard library,
>> wouldn't it make it just as easy for those tools to be written? What's
>> the advantage of being in the standard library? I see only
>> disadvantages: to begin with it potentially increases the time that
>> Walter or other Phobos contributors may have to spend on it, even if
>> it's just reviewing patches or making sure the code works.
>
> If nothing, else, it makes it easier to keep in line with dmd itself. Since the
> dmd front end is LGPL, it's not possible to have a Boost port of it (like the
> Phobos version will be) without Walter's consent. And I'd be surprised if he did
> that for a third party library (though he seems to be pretty open on a lot of
> that kind of stuff). Not to mention, Walter and the core developers are _exactly_
> the kind of people that you want working on a lexer or parser of the language
> itself, because they're the ones who work on it.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Eh? That license argument doesn't make sense: if the lexer and parser 
were to be based on DMD itself, then putting it in the standard library 
is equivalent (in licensing terms) to licensing the lexer and parser 
parts of DMD in Boost. More correctly, what I mean by equivalent, is 
that there no reason why Walter would allow one thing and not the 
other... (because on both cases he would have to issue that license)

As for your second argument, yes, Walter and the core developers would 
be the most qualified people to work in it, no question about it. But my 
point is, I don't think Walter and Phobos core devs should be working on 
it, because it takes time away from other things that are much more 
important. Their time is precious.
I think our main point of disagreement is just how important a D lexer 
and/or parser would be. I think it would be of very low interest, 
definitely not a "major benefit to the D community".

For starters, regarding its use in IDEs: I think we are *ages* away from 
the point were an IDE based on D only will be able to compete with IDEs 
based in Eclipse/Visual-Studio/Xcode/etc.. I think much sooner we will 
have a full D compiler written in D than a (competitive) D IDE written 
in D. We barely have mature GUI libraries from what I understand.
(What may be more realistic is an IDE partially written in D, and 
otherwise based on Eclipse/Visual-Studio/etc., but even so, I think it 
would be hard to compete with other non-D IDEs)


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer