DMD front-end can be used as a library with Dub

[Alexander Breckel via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 29 August 2016 at 11:27:44 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
> On Monday, 29 August 2016 at 10:42:23 UTC, Alexander Breckel 
> wrote:
>> I just tried to use the DMD frontend as a Dub package in my 
>> own project to parse and analyze D files and it ... just 
>> worked. The dub.json for dmd is fairly small and doesn't 
>> require any changes to the code. This might be common 
>> knowledge, but I was completely unprepared for this :)
>>
>> Please note: This is "only" the dmd frontend (lexer, parser, 
>> semantic passes, CTFE). Code generation will be more 
>> complicated.
>
> Thx, that's interesting from an IDE developer perspective.
>
> However since DMD is a "single shot" program, using it as 
> library could introduce memory problems. Also string handling 
> is C style, unlike libdparse, which is truly written in D. 
> However libdparse does nothing more than producing the AST, 
> which becomes problematic with "static if" expressions, mixins, 
> etc.

Right. With these limitations, it might also be useful for 
writing static analysis tools, coding guidelines checkers, ...

If someone wants to write a tool that tells me which functions 
and methods are not reachable from main(), or could be declared 
pure nothrow @nogc, i would be more than happy to use it :)