Porting VisualD to Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 6/11/2012 1:10 PM, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 June 2012 at 18:45:55 UTC, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
>> On Sunday, 10 June 2012 at 18:16:39 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>>> I have recently refactored the code so that the parser and the
>>> semantic analysis can run in an different process (a local COM
>>> server). This was mainly to avoid GC stalls within the IDE, but could
>>> also be used to plugin other code for semantic analysis. The current
>>> interface is here:
>>> https://github.com/rainers/visuald/blob/master/vdc/ivdserver.d
>> Great! This simplifies my task a lot. Interface and implementation
>> seem to be straightforward. Of course, I'll need to understand overall
>> design first, but now I have a good starting point.
> Do I understand correctly that syntax coloring is implemented via using
> GetTip / GetTipResult pair of functions, which serialize tokens using
> ast.node.Node.toD(CodeWriter)? If yes, is format defined by some
> standard or documented? If no, what mechanism is used to highlight syntax?

No. Syntax highlighting is done by the lexer, no (complex) parsing 
involved. The only case where the parser is consulted (but not waiting 
for an answer, just using cached information) is to figure out whether 
"in"/"is" are used as operators or as parameter modifier/IsExpression, 
respectively.

Syntax highlighting needs to be rather fast, as it is done during 
drawing, so switching context is out of the question. Instead, Visual D 
keeps a lexer-state (an int) per line and continues scanning from the 
start of the line when color information is requested by the IDE.