On 2011-12-04 20:53, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 12/04/2011 08:50 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2011-12-04 15:38, Marco Leise wrote:
Am 04.12.2011, 13:41 Uhr, schrieb Jacob Carlborg <d...@me.com>:
On 2011-12-02 22:40, Somedude wrote:
Yes, the IDE takes care of a lot of boilerplate code. It's ugly, but
it's hardly a productivity issue. One other thing that's cool is
refactoring is no longer an issue, like it is in C or C++. With
powerful
IDEs, you can refactor without fearing too much regression, and
that's a
very important advantage, especially in a heavily OO language.
That's no longer the case if you take a look at newer C/C++ IDE's like
the latest versions of XCode that uses Clang to handle basically all
language related features of the IDE, autocompletion, syntax
highlighting, refactoring and similar.
So we want a flexible compiler front end for D written in D as well,
right ?
Exactly, one that can be used as a library.
What would be the interface to such a library?
That would take some thought if one would develop a library like that,
it would also take some time and space to explain here. Preferably there
would be API's to interact with the library for all phases of the
compilation:
* Lexing
* Parsing
* Semantic analyzing
* AST traversing
* Both machine dependent and independent optimization
* Code generation
* Linking
These API's could be low level API's. Then there could be higher level
API's built on top of the low level API's for specific tasks, like
autocompletion, syntax highlighting, refactoring and so on.
An alternative would be to just use the same API as Clang does. Clang
also has two levels of API's. The unstable low level API's is the C++
code, on top of that is the stable C API built for more specific tasks
like autocompletion, syntax highlighting and refactoring.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
