D AutoCompletion: is ycmd integration valuable?

[Idan Arye via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 21:02:29 UTC, rcorre wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 18:37:41 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Try neomake[1], I wrote the checker for it - it will 
>> automatically detect of you're on a dub project and parse the 
>> dub describe output for includes.
>>
>> Also, if you use neovim it runs in the background and is 
>> non-blocking.
>
> I'm getting closer and closer to jumping on the neovim 
> bandwagon...
> I was never able to get vim-dispatch working properly.
>
>> I guess I shod make a blog post for setting up vim to use D ad 
>> I've seem a lot of trouble with it recently.
>
> Please do. I'd especially like to hear about the use of 
> makeprg/errorformat with regards to filtering dub output and 
> jumping to assert failures.
>
> On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 18:29:26 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
>>
>> I've avoided adding this features because byte offset is very 
>> exact. Column counts can be thrown off by tab width settings 
>> in some editors. Requiring that the lexer know the tab width 
>> before it even starts running is a bit of nonsense I'd prefer 
>> to not deal with.
>
> Well, someone has to do the conversion.
> But you're right, it should be the editor -- having DCD operate 
> on byte offsets makes sense.
> Unfortunately, the ycmd API asks for the line/col position from 
> the editor (unless I'm missing something).
> Maybe this is just a sign that ycmd is the wrong road to go 
> down here, but I was hoping I could leverage some useful 
> existing functionality in ycmd and hopefully get some better 
> performance (completions provided via dutyl+DCD can take a 
> noticeable amount of time on my older machine).

What the ycmd API accepts is not the visual column but the "byte 
column" - how many bytes from the beginning of the line the 
cursor is placed. This means that if the semantic engine opens 
the file and reads it, it can calculate the byte offset from the 
line and "byte column" supplied to it - without caring about 
multibyte characters tab settings.