One more question - an untapped audience.

[Jakob Ovrum]

On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 01:48:24 UTC, Manu wrote:
> The other major hurdle is a proper parser usable for tooling. 
> Many are
> trying to reinvent the wheel, and nothing short of the DMD 
> front-end itself
> is really capable of properly parsing D code.
> The biggest missing component I'm aware of is this
> DMD-frontend-as-a-library idea that is always being discussed, 
> but never
> seems to be happening. If I had to nominate a single critical 
> goal for the
> ecosystem for 2014, that would be it.

To be precise, it's not the parsing that is the issue. Creating a 
fully compliant (with many updates to the spec needed along the 
way) and robust parser is not particularly hard and is happening 
with stuff like SDC, and more recently, DScanner.

It is the semantic analysis that needs a *proper* engine such as 
that of a compiler, in which case DMD's front-end and SDC are the 
only real options, not the best-effort, good-enough crap is 
currently used by IDEs.

The best we can manage with the current approach is something 
close to what Visual Studio has for C++, but not quite even at 
that level (because D's generic additions and CTFE mix things up 
further), and even then it would be years away in terms of 
development time.