A hypothetical question

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-25 20:10:44 -0400, Ellery Newcomer 
<ellery-newcomer at utulsa.edu> said:

> Thoughts?

In case you're interested, Xcode, Apple's IDE, has to deal with 
multiple versions all the time. It's typical for Mac developement to 
build two or four versions of the same executable (PowerPC 32 and/or 64 
bit + Intel 32 and/or 64 bit) before merging all four in the same 
executable file. That's done automatically by Xcode under the hood by 
compiling each file multiple time for all the targets.

So with Xcode you're generally compiling several versions of the same 
code at one time. Xcode doesn't do a very rigourous semantic analysis: 
it merly ignores conditionals when it gathers its list of symbol for 
autocompletion, and it doesn't itself flag errors as you type (it does 
run the compiler in the background though, and shows errors inline in 
the source code instantanously when you build).

So a similar idea for an IDE like Eclipse/Descent could do is allow you 
to select one or more sets of compiler flags and combine the result 
(autocompletion choices + errors) in a single view. Xcode does that 
only for the architecture.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/