DMD/Objective-C Alpha 1

[Robert Clipsham]

On 02/06/2011 13:54, Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2011-06-02 07:49:25 -0400, Robert Clipsham
> <robert at octarineparrot.com> said:
>
>> This is pretty cool! I'd test it, but D for XCode doesn't seem to play
>> well with XCode 4, and my XCode 3 installation appears to have
>> disappeared since I installed 4. Will the complete OS X toolchain work
>> with this eventually? (Interface builder, instruments etc)
>
> Current state the OSX toolchain:
>
> - Problems getting gdb recognize debug symbols. Perhaps this can be
> alleviated by replacing gdb with a fresh GNU version instead of
> Apple's... I haven't tested. Ideally, DMD would generate symbols that
> Apple's gdb understands.

I assume Apple will eventually be moving to LLDB, it could be a good 
idea to see about adding some preliminary D support to clang, that would 
sort this out. Alternatively, there are patches for older gdb versions 
(they need some tweaking to work with Apple's gdb, I've done it before 
but never saved the modified patch).

> - Half-baked Xcode 4 support in D for Xcode. You can rely on Xcode 3 in
> the meanwhile. Given the Xcode plugin API is private and undocumented,
> it's not as trivial as it should be.

Again, perhaps some tweaking to clang would simplify this somewhat? At 
least for code completion/syntax highlighting/errors, not sure about 
anything else. I'm currently using vim due to the lack of XCode 4 support.

> - It might be nice to add a D parser to Interface Builder so it
> automatically recognize outlets and actions in D files that have
> Objective-C objects (thanks to D/Objective-C). I'd guess this is a
> private API too, but I haven't verified. Not having that is just an
> inconvenience however, since you can always add them manually in the IB
> file too.
>
> - I don't think you need to do anything for Instruments (and the
> underlying dtrace) to work with D code... except perhaps make debug
> symbols work so stack traces include line numbers. Perhaps one would
> want to create a custom instrument to observe the GC in druntime.

The lack of line numbers in debug info on OS X is something that's 
really annoying me, I may look into this in the future should I get 
chance - if someone doesn't beat me to it of course. Wouldn't be the 
first time I'd spent a week playing with dmd's debug info to get it 
working...

> I don't have much time to work on D for Xcode at the moment, mostly
> because I'm putting my spare time into developing D/Objective-C these
> days. But I'd be glad to accept pull requests for D for Xcode.
> <https://github.com/michelf/d-for-xcode>

Best of luck with this! Again, I doubt I'll have time to work on D for 
XCode.

-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/