Visual D 0.51.0 - semantic engine based on dmd frontend

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 18/01/2020 17:43, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 18 January 2020 at 14:22:41 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>> This version features a first version of an intellisense engine that
>> is based on the DMD frontend (as of version 2.090) for semantic
>> analysis. It is still considered experimental and has to be enabled on
>> the respective language options page.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Rainer
> 
> Nice, that is awesome. Could the engine also be re-used for in e.g. the
> D lsp server?

Sure, this should be possible. This is the used dmd fork:
https://github.com/rainers/dmd/tree/dmdserver and most of the client
code is here: https://github.com/dlang/visuald/tree/master/vdc/dmdserver

The frontend doesn't make it easy to implement other functionality like
refactoring and formatting, though. On the other hand, running both
libdparse and another engine in parallel doesn't seem desirable, too. So
it is not easy to get the best of both engines (it is currently similar
with DParser and dmdserver).