Flower - announce and inquiry

[Ary Manzana]

torhu escribió:
> It would probably have to be a debugger gui only,
> since a full-blown IDE written by a single person would most likely 
> never reach a usable state.  It's just too much work.  I don't think the 
> world needs another dead project in that category.

Hello all.

That paragraph is it, except that it can be done, but it'll take a lot 
of time. I'm talking about Descent. I really could use some help, and I 
think that if more people would contribute to the project, D would have 
a nice IDE. Right now it isn't an IDE, but just because the project is a 
baby (raised without a mother! :-().

1. Eclipse can already specify custom run commands, so launching rebuild 
from it should work. Additionally, I don't know a lot about rebuild, but 
if it has a configuration file that it could appear with nice colors and 
keywords, show an outline, etc.

2. Reading this article 
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Debugger/how-to.html should be 
enough to make ddbg work in Eclipse.

3. Semantic errors, autocompletion, refactoring, etc., are harder stuff 
that may take a lot more time, but once done they'll rock.

So I clearly see three points that can be developed separately[1]. It 
just needs to be done. Of course I can do all the work, and I'm sure by 
the time I'll finish it it will still be a very useful tool, but if just 
I weren't alone...

I don't mind if the project still continues as a "single man" project, 
I'm alwaying learning stuff by reading the compiler front-end, the 
Eclipse framework, etc, plus it's always a joy seing something working 
nicely. I'd just really like it to be done for D (the language and the 
community), because it lacks such a tool, and each person I tell about D 
says to me "And, say, does it have an IDE? Not a good one yet? Oh, well, 
we'll just stick with Java". A couple of days ago I showed D to my 
coworkers and bosses, and they really, really liked it, but asked me 
that question, and afterwards the sad answer.

The only problem would be bobef gains no money, but the project could 
accept donations, and if some guys here are willing to buy such tool I'm 
sure they'll donate if they can get it for free.

Regards,
Ary

[1] There may be more, I can think of formatting, which can be 
implemented just writing an AST visitor, and cleaning up code (for 
example making each if always have curly braces... or never if possible, 
etc.).