Foreach Closures?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-04-10 04:24, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 4/9/12 9:21 PM, Ary Manzana wrote:
>> Yes, D definitely needs that. The Eclipse plugin could just use bindings
>> to the D compiler API with JNI.
>
> Would the JSON compiler output help?
>
> Andrei

No, it's no way near sufficient for what Descent can do and what's 
expected from an IDE these days, think JDT for Eclipse.

Descent can handle:

* Syntax highlighting
* Semantic highlighting
* Show lex, parse and semantic errors
* Compile time debugging
* Compile time view
* Formatting
* Show the actual type of an inferred or aliased type
* Smart autocompletion
* Many other things as well

Note that in addition to (most of) the above, JDT can handle a lot more. 
The compiler is the only tool that can properly handle this. It's also 
the only sane approach, to have the compiler usable as a library.

Just take a look how it used to be (and in some cases are) in the C/C++ 
world before Clang and LLVM came a long:

* You have the compiler
* An IDE with a "parser/compiler"
* The debugger with an (expression) "compiler"

All these "compilers" are different and need to stay in synch. That's 
not how you do good software development. You build a compiler library 
that can be used in all the above tools. BTW, it's only the real 
compiler that can handle everything properly.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg