On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:09:28 -0400, Unknown W. Brackets
<[email protected]> wrote:
Check out clang. LLVM frontend for C, C++, and Objective-C which has
similar IDE intergration in mind.
Maybe ldc can take this route?
Actually, I think it would be much more fruitful to have a standard way
to integrate a compiler into an IDE. An API would be needed with things
like: (all optional)
1. Lex a file (returning basic token information.)
2. Parse a file (returning some sort of standardized syntax tree.)
3. Compile a file (returning various error structures.)
4. List common keywords in the language.
5. Syntax check a file (no output, just the errors.)
To put it in code, imagine this:
---
compiler_syntax_func_t syntaxcheck = get_compiler_sym("syntaxcheck");
char[] source_data = get_editor_source();
compiler_error_t* compiler_errors;
compiler_errors = syntaxcheck(source_data.ptr, source_data.length);
compiler_error_t[] errors;
for (auto p = compiler_errors; *p; p++)
errors ~= (*p).dup;
compiler_free_func_t compiler_free = get_compiler_sym("compiler_free");
compiler_free(compiler_errors);
---
Of course, I'm sure a better API could be devised. This sort of format,
if properly standardized, could be used to make IDEs much more
efficient. It would also allow for much better and more accurate error
reporting, and the compiler could be loaded as a shared object so that
initialization cost would be low.
Most language services for Visual Studio are essentially a large part of
the compiler (often reimplemented in C# or some such) without the code
generation. It seems like such a silly and obvious waste to me.
-[Unknown]
davidl wrote:
I hope it will be integrated to the Compiler. As IDE should not deal
with language changes.
Dealing with parsing sources of D1, D2, D3, D4... is actually
cumbersome. The IDE development gets hindered because the
autocompletion must be able to parse both D1/D2 and future DMD
releases. And endless bug fixes.
An extendible while relatively more stable metadata file format may
greatly ease IDE development.
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