dmd support for IDEs

[Jeremie Pelletier]

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?

Eclipse is heavy, slow and often unresponsive. I use poseidon myself 
because it is light and fast and I don't require much more from an IDE 
at the moment.