DConf 2013 Day 3 Talk 1: Metaprogramming in the Real World by Don Clugston

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 13/06/2013 10:05, Don wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 08:25:19 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 08:16:56 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:
>>> Visual Studio constantly crashes for me at work, and I can imagine
>>> MonoDevelop and Eclipse being similar, but simpler editors like
>>> Sublime Text, TextMate, vim, emacs etc. shouldn't crash. I've been
>>> using Sublime Text for years now and I don't think it has ever crashed.
>>
>> I am quite surprised to hear this is an issue at all btw. Neither
>> Mono-D nor Eclipse DDT have never crashed for me on my smallish
>> sources. And I just can't imagine D syntax highlighting crashing vim
>> or emacs :)
>>
>> Mono-D has had update issues thanks to MonoDevelop upstream but that
>> is somewhat different story.
>
> Mono-D and Eclipse DDT both have major problems with long pauses while
> typing (eg 15 seconds unresponsive) and crashes. Both of them even have
> "modules of death" where just viewing the file will cause a crash. If
> you're unlucky enough to get one of those open in your default workspace
> file, the IDE will crash at startup...
>

Regarding DDT, do you mean a crash were actually the Eclipse application 
terminates? I find that highly unlikely, the whole codebase of Eclipse 
DDT is Java based so there should not be a crash like that (baring some 
old JVM bug, but even so...).

A freeze is possible, if there's some infinite loop bug, or some massive 
slowdown due to a crappy algorithm (quadratic growth or worse)

As a DDT maintaner I've never had a bug report, or even heard of such 
crashes. I can't guess people's minds..., and I skip most newsgroups 
threads if the title doesn't seem relevant. It was actually only by 
chance that I found this subthread discussing IDEs.

I have heard about long pauses and delays, that I have. It's something 
that needs to be looked at, it's a massive issue. Even so I've never had 
any concrete bug report on such performance issues. Or even someone 
mentioned a concrete file I could take a look at and see if using 
autocomplete there was slow and unresponsive.

My work on a new parser for DDT is nearly complete, a new version should 
be out soonish. And from now onwards it should be possible to tackle 
these issues.
I do agree frequent crashes and long pauses should take precedence over 
nearly all other issues.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer