Adding D support to Clang format

[Zachary Yedidia]

On Saturday, 29 April 2023 at 10:46:45 UTC, Johan wrote:
> On Saturday, 29 April 2023 at 10:08:41 UTC, Johan wrote:
>> On Friday, 28 April 2023 at 23:30:37 UTC, Zachary Yedidia
>>
>> [...]
>
> 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

I think you make some good points. The clang-format codebase is a 
bit gnarly to work with (~20,000 lines of C++ without any clear 
separation/organization for formatting all the various 
languages). I wasn't aware of sdfmt until the foundation meeting 
forum post yesterday, but maybe it is a better direction to go 
in. Having briefly tried sdfmt, I think the main thing I miss is 
comment/assignment alignment. I was under the impression that 
this might be difficult to implement in sdfmt, but if not I think 
that would resolve a lot for me (sdfmt already does better than 
dfmt for me). It would also be great to have import sorting. Some 
other minor issues with sdfmt are: not many configuration options 
(though I found the defaults to be pretty good), no documentation 
on how to set the configuration options that do exist (i.e., the 
.sdfmt JSON file is not documented), and a lack of visibility of 
the project overall because it is hidden within SDC (probably why 
I was not aware of it until recently).

I think for now I'll just sit on my clang-format fork and see if 
there is interest/it's feasible to implement these things in 
sdfmt. If so, then I would be happy to use (and possibly 
contribute to) sdfmt instead.