Greetings, New IDE Development

[Answar Enchali via Digitalmars-d]

Hi,

I work for a company Eco-Médias Tech and we would like to invest 
in adding D support to our current in house IDE. The current D 
IDE's either lack strong modern development capabilities or do 
not fully support our needs.

Ideally, what we require to quickly integrate D with our IDE is 
for dmd to support full source line mapping to both object and 
binary(debug) file generation and full ast and symbol type 
mapping.

The first case allows our IDE to determine any source line given 
debug errors and runtime errors up to the capabilities of 
acuteness. This is critical, as complexity of programs increase, 
it is necessary to know exactly where the runtime behavior is 
located in the source. Since D supports embedding tangential 
source code, these too would require source line mappings through 
derivative analysis.

For the second case, Having proper symbol to type mapping allows 
us to build proper 'intellisense' resolution, advanced code map 
generation, and support multi-resolution syntax correction 
schemes that we use for our current C++ development.

While the amount of information that the compiler can emit is 
quite large for our typical programs, we aim at achieving maximum 
programming efficiency and are not concerned with memory issues 
nor disk space limitations. Since compilation speed is already 
quite fast with dmd and emitting such information from the 
compiler should be equivalent to filling a string buffer, we do 
not expect to see any serious drawbacks. We are currently in the 
process of upgrading to 256xC3000 virtualized mainframe 
distribution server with a total of 65kGB of memory.

Does dmd support outputting the full ast with symbol type 
information and full line mapping or will these features have to 
be added? If they are to be added, what would be a ball part 
man-hour cost to add these features? If we are able to integrate 
D support in to our IDE we will release the D portion of our 
IDE(removing the C++ side as it is proprietary) as a sign of good 
faith.

Thank you,

Answar Enchali