DDT and Descent

[Ludovit Lucenic]

On Saturday, 5 January 2013 at 03:37:06 UTC, Jeremy Powers wrote:
> Recently I was poking around seeing what it would take to 
> create a D
> plugin for IntelliJ, and took a look at DDT as a staring point.
> Referencing:
>
> http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/ddt/wiki/DevelopmentGuide
>
> There is a relation between the DDT project and the Descent 
> compiler
> that isn't clear to me - on the one hand, they are separate, 
> with
> separate repositories, but on the other descent.compiler 
> contains
> references to DDT in the build...
>
> Is the descent compiler now considered a sub-project of DDT, 
> owned and
> maintained by the same folks, or is it 'legacy', or what?  What 
> is the
> future path for the descent.compiler vs. DDT?
>
> As mentioned, my interest is in re-using parts for a separate 
> IDE
> plugin (having used Eclipse for years, I am heavily biased 
> towards
> IntelliJ).  From a first glance it looks like the 
> descent.compiler
> only has some _very_ minimal dependencies on Eclipse/OSGI, and 
> could
> easily be a reusable lexer/parser library for any java code 
> what needs
> it.  It looks like there hasn't been any changes to 
> descent.compiler
> in quite some time (latest was an addition of ddt referencing 
> pom.xml)
> - is Descent still considered an active project on its own, or 
> is it
> being fully consumed by DDT, or somewhere in the middle?
>
> Thanks,
> Jeremy

The author of Descent decided to push the project no further, 
because considered it to be in a very unmaintanable and hardly to 
extend state. The internal architecture was considered 
inappropriate for further project growth. The DDT is the only 
resurrection of the original idea, that is being 
developed/maintained at the moment, as far as i know. Thou, DDT 
does not support features like Descent did - especially regarding 
debugging support.

So if you want to inspire yourself, feel free to dig up and use 
any (merged) portion of code from either project. I keep my 
fingers crossed for you.