dmd support for IDEs

[Lutger]

language_fan wrote:

> Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:19:56 -0700, Walter Bright thusly 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?
> 
> Well since there is already a project working on an Eclipse plugin, I see
> little use for other IDEs at the moment. The D community is rather small
> and only a small amount of people are capable of developing and willing
> to donate their free time on free IDE development (commercial IDEs have
> small potential now that Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ/KDevelop/Visual Studio
> dominate the market). So why not concentrate on fixing the spec and
> fixing compiler bugs instead of building a modest IDE support no one will
> use?

Because people do see the use of other IDEs (counting vim here too as an 
IDE) and xml / json output is useful for more than just IDEs.