Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
I think it would be great, but XML is only one format and a heavy one at that, JSON for example is much lighter and easier to parse. It shouldn't be hard to support both.
I'd never heard of JSON, but looking at it, it makes sense. I don't see much point in supporting both.
However I would make the file generation optional, as the IDE might just want to read from the standard output stream of dmd instead, this would also be useful for shell scripts.
Yes, writing it to stdout as an option is a good idea.
Support to get the semantics information of multiple files at once would also be neat, just like dmd can generate one object file from multiple source files.
Yes.
Would it even be possible to have the C api behind the xml/json frontends exported in a dll, so IDEs could just dynamically link to it and call that API directly instead of parsing an intermediary text format.
I did that with the C++ compiler, and it's a big pain to support. I don't think it would be onerous to fork/exec the compiler to do the work, capture the output, and parse it.
