Adding D support to Clang format

[Johan]

On Saturday, 29 April 2023 at 10:08:41 UTC, Johan wrote:
> On Friday, 28 April 2023 at 23:30:37 UTC, Zachary Yedidia wrote:
>> Clang format is a high quality auto-formatter developed by the 
>> LLVM project, mainly for use with C and C++, but it also 
>> supports Java, C#, JavaScript, JSON, Objective-C, Proto, 
>> TableGen, TextProto, and Verilog. I think it would be great to 
>> add support for D, and hopefully shouldn't be too difficult 
>> since it is a C-like language.
>
> clang-format is indeed a godsent formatter.
> I recently also read that it can do languages quite different 
> from C, and hoped for D support in the future.
> It will be very nice for people (like me) who work on mixed 
> C++/D codebases.
>
>> I have started an implementation for D here: 
>> https://github.com/zyedidia/llvm-project/tree/clang-format-d, 
>> with some information about the implementation here (how to 
>> download/build/test): 
>> https://github.com/zyedidia/llvm-project/blob/clang-format-d/clang-format-d.md.
>
> Great you are picking this up and leading the effort!
> Hope to be able to help out.

I'm enthusiastic, but after some more thinking I think it's wise 
to talk with the sdfmt team and discuss which way to go: better 
to have everyone work on one project, rather than two. I'm very 
interested in working on a good formatter, but not two ;-)

Perhaps the upsides of clang-format (what is already there) are 
not so large.
A big downside of clang-format is that you are tied to LLVM's 
project (release schedule, way of working, community, ...). In 
order to format D code, you'd have to install clang-format (and 
the whole LLVM dependency?). And you are programming in C++, 
which is a pity for a project that is purely for D.
Because sdfmt has its own 'parser' (excellent!), it is quite a 
small program that can easily be built using `dub`. That makes 
the barrier to entry for developers very small (no need to build 
or test `sdc` itself).

-Johan