dmd support for IDEs

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Walter Bright wrote:
> In my discussions with companies about adopting D, the major barrier 
> that comes up over and over isn't Tango vs Phobos, dmd being GPL, 
> debugger support, libraries, bugs, etc., although those are important.
> 
> It's the IDE.
> 
> They say that the productivity gains of D's improvements are 
> overbalanced by the loss of productivity by moving away from an IDE. And 
> what is it about an IDE that is so productive? Intellisense (Microsoft's 
> word for autocompletion).
> 
> So, while I'm not going to be writing an IDE, I figure that dmd can 
> help. dmd already puts out .doc and .di files. How about putting out an 
> xml file giving all the information needed for an IDE to implement 
> autocompletion? There'd be one .xml file generated per .d source file.
> 
> The nice thing about an xml file is while D is relatively easy to parse, 
> xml is trivial. Furthermore, an xml format would be fairly robust in the 
> face of changes to D syntax.
> 
> What do you think?

I think it would be great, but XML is only one format and a heavy one at 
that, JSON for example is much lighter and easier to parse. It shouldn't 
be hard to support both.

However I would make the file generation optional, as the IDE might just 
want to read from the standard output stream of dmd instead, this would 
also be useful for shell scripts.

Support to get the semantics information of multiple files at once would 
also be neat, just like dmd can generate one object file from multiple 
source files.

Would it even be possible to have the C api behind the xml/json 
frontends exported in a dll, so IDEs could just dynamically link to it 
and call that API directly instead of parsing an intermediary text format.

Jeremie