dmd support for IDEs

[Walter Bright]

Ellery Newcomer wrote:
> ctfe. compile time (weird connection?). what do string mixins evaluate
> to?

No

> can I look at their result from the ide?

No

> what do templates expand
> to?

No

> what does this here alias/typedef represent?

Yes

> what does this here
> typeof expand to?

No

> what does this here c-style type normalize to (in
> d-style)?

No

> As for other transformations, it seemed like Ary had some neat tricks in
> descent that showed things like int i; going to int i = 0; etc. maybe
> wistful thinking.
> 
> while we're at it,
> 
> when I see a symbol, can I find its type?

Yes

> can I find every symbol that
> would follow it in a dot list/exp?

Yes

> when I see a symbol, can I find everywhere it's used?

No, but could be added

> when I see a scope, can I see every symbol that's in it?

Yes

> when I see a module, can I find everywhere it's imported?

Yes

> can I see exactly what symbols are pulled in?

No, but could be added

> Can I perform analysis to
> show me where those dang cyclic dependencies are?

Don't know

> when I see source code, can I perform a simple walk over the xml to
> format it?

No


Think of what it provides as very similar to what ddoc does, except that 
instead of being in a human-readable format it would be a 
machine-readable one.

In other words, for each module you'll be able to get

. all the symbols in that module, and the members of those symbols 
(recursively)
. the file/line of the source location of each symbol
. the ddoc comment for each symbol
. the type of each symbol

Things could be added over time, I was just thinking of this for starters.